A Blog on Collaboration
“I always find that if two (or more) of us throw ideas backwards and forwards I get to more interesting and original places than I could have ever have gotten to on my own” (Cleese, John 1991 A lecture on creativity.
When work is passed through too many hands it becomes susceptible to convolution, it can lose its aim and as a consequence grow further away from its original purpose. There is a Parks and Recreations episode entitled ‘The Camel’ that concerns itself with the design of a mural. In the episode, all the characters in the Parks and Recs department design their own mural based off the spirit of the town they live in. All the character’s design something completely different and vouch for their ideas to be agreed upon. Ultimately, they compromise, they submit a piece of art that contains elements of everyones design but looks horrible. In his article, The Screenplay Business, managing creativity and script development in the film industry Peter Bloure suggests that if collaborators agree upon a singular vision at the start of the project and create everything with this vision in mind, what is created will become unified and succinct. His first dot point reads ‘Be consistent-keep returning to the vision of the type of film you are trying to make, and refer everything back to that’.
In class, when creating our 6-9 frame stories, Matt, Olivia and I sat down outside building 9 and agreed from start to finish what we would create. So when we walked around the campus with our camera we knew (and had agreed upon) the start point, middle point and end point of our story. Every photo we took from that moment on fitted into this idea. Our individual ideas, that we put aside at the start, saw the light of day within the nitty gritty of making the images- through framing, shot selection and acting choices we all got to place our own creativity on the activity within the constraints of a singular vision.
In our second tutorial of class we watched a French Short film and began answering questions in regards to dramatic action. The idea behind the table based group activity was that we could take the story another direction through our groups singular idea. In this activity, everyone was sprouting random ideas without agreeing upon or elaborating on what anyone else would say. We placed no constraints on ourselves at the beginning. There was no unified idea. About 5 minutes into the discussion I put my head down and answered all the questions by myself on my laptop because I couldn’t deal with the off topic, spontaneous ideas of the group. This is an example of collaboration gone wrong and links back to the Parks and Recreations episode that derives its title from this expression: “That a camel is a horse made by a committee”.
Finally, Cleese’s quote still has merit, but is far too vague to be wholly true. Cleese says “Throw ideas backwards and forwards I get to more interesting and original places than I could have ever have gotten to on my own”. He simply wrote ‘throw ideas’, however he should have written “Throw corresponding ideas”. Collaboration needs to be a formal communication process, throwing ideas will not do.
Nonetheless I can understand where he is coming from and the importance of collaboration at university level. In the professional world one does not get unlimited time to make whatever they want. Collaboration is great for practice because it places constraints. The best artists, writers, filmmakers can create quality content anywhere, anytime. In the professional world, their talent is a commodity that needs to remain fruitful in order to hold value. Collaborating, is to compromise, to sacrifice, it may lead to worst results, it may lead to better results, but nonetheless it is something, that for better or worse, happens.
By Brydan Meredith, s3547569