THE PUB GARDENERS
When AI steals away their careers in advertising, a desperate writer and artist 'borrow' a van full of gardening equipment from the scene of their final ad shoot and search for new meaning in their lives.
Which, being English, means they head to the pub.
In the Dog & Duck, they find a business on its knees, threatened with closure by a new, cheaper local venue that's stolen all their customers away.
Seeing a mirror image of their own struggle in the dire situation the Dog & Duck's landlord is facing, our creatives vow to save the pub in the only way they know how.
Excerpt
Ed hit the play arrow on his screen and his edit of the first ident played. It bore precious little resemblance to Waverley’s storyboard visualisation, and the words in Darlington’s script were largely ignored. Worse still, the spot was being voiced by a male AI bot that sounded like a male AI bot, despite the script requesting a female and assuming she’d be a human.
The woes didn’t cease there. The colours of everything on screen were pure 90s acid, totally wrong for the conservative gardeners who formed the target market for the chain of garden centres. And the design on the side of the Crafter remained the psychedelic disgrace Ed had shown them earlier.
The client turned to Rick smiling. “I love it, what do you think?”
Darlington and Waverley could tell he hated it almost as much as they did. “Great for a first draft,” he said. “A few tweaks in post and we’re there.”
And it was then and there that both Darlington and Waverley knew they wouldn’t be in those post-production sessions, whether they were invited to be there or not. Both felt pure emptiness about this project now. The client had been right all along. There had been no point them being there. Ed was in control now. He and his new AI toy could do what they liked and everything both Ed and his machine did wowed the client, because it was so cheap, so fast.
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