Collaboration.
Being a kid with a couple or so sisters, I’m pretty comfortable with ‘collaboration’. All be it that sometimes just meant yelling over each other, the final idea often being the loudest. However, those days are (not so) long gone.
Working with our peers at uni, and in the future, our colleagues, is really important in our media-based line of work. For, as John Cleese best said: “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.” A lot of truth rings true in this statement.
Drawing from a recent, and perhaps not so typical example of collaboration from this studio: defining difficult terminology. A couple of abstract, and at least for me, pretty difficult terms have come up over the past couple of weeks in class. One such example includes: tone. What is tone when put in the context of a world? During class our table got to task, bouncing around definitions and associative words. I defined it as “the attitude a piece takes”. Someone took that, and bounced back “feeling” and then “colour” and “temperature” and “mood”. Next, as a collective class we thawed out the idea of tone further, finally coming up with some impressive and really comprehensive ideas.

Such included:
– “Tone is the culmination of sensory stimuli employed to extract a general feeling, attitude or emotion from an audience/consumer”
Ed.

– “The degree and nature by which aesthetic and narrative elements formulate an intended emotional and psychological affect in a viewer or reader in construction of a world.”
Michael.

Collaboration was key in arriving at these definitions. As a collective whole, we were able to arrive at an understanding of the term tone. One I know I would have had zero chance of arriving at individually.

However collaboration is present, if you’re open to it, in many forms in life. Including the more traditional form we attempted in class during week 2. After watching a short film titled J’Attendrai Le Suivant (I’ll Wait for the Next One) we discussed as group how this short film could continue if it was a feature length film. A fun activity that our group really engaged with and got a little silly with- which was great! After settling on a few core things such as who was the protagonist (the female train commuter) we let our imaginations run wild. Towards the end seemingly trying to one up each other with the sheer preposterous nature of the next idea.

“she’s got brain caner!”
“she’s a ghost!”

I thought this lack of boundary was wonderful. It lent very well to a creative freedom that the group tapped into together to produce some actually pretty cool ideas.
I think collaboration is a great tool to utilize to further develop a well thought out story in a script, novel or film form, as well as acting as a really useful tool for the brainstorming stage as well. In this case, collaboration also acted as a welcomed reminder to not take yourself too seriously.