This term I have been working on three separate projects with my creative consultant, Ryan Harvey. To gain a better understanding of my research topic Ryan has agreed to experiment with unfamiliar collaboration techniques whilst we work on these projects. The aim of this is to document our experiences and review the various advantages and disadvantages of online/offline collaboration.
When I say 'online collaboration' I am referring to any means of communication that allows a space for shared contributions to a piece of work. Some notable experiences would be Celtx, Collabowrite and Amazon Studio, however there are a number of everyday gadgets that were implemented as part of the collaborative process. Skype, for example, with its "Share Screens" function, proved to be extremely useful for researching music and for sharing work. Another useful everyday gadget was "Wunderlist", the to-do list app. We were able to organise our schedule and send each other updates on work and the clients.
'Offline collaboration' pertains to face-to-face communication, such as our meeting with the client as well as any meetings we had separate to that. To get an accurate overview of our experiences we each kept a video diary to record how we thought the meetings went, both online and offline.
January proved to be the ideal time to experiment with these means of collaboration, as one of our meetings was nearly cancelled as a result of the snow, however once we rearranged our schedule we were able to have our meeting online rather than face-to-face.
I made notes in each of our meetings, pictures of which can be found here. They provide an accurate insight into each of the projects that are currently being worked on. A summary of the video diaries will be uploaded within the next 24 hours. It will aim document and evaluate the experiences Ryan & I had with the different collaborative styles.
So far this is as much as I can include in this little update, but the Video Diary Summary will have a lot more information on our working processes and what we each thought of the different techniques.
So, to summarise, over the past couple of months I have taken on three very different projects; a music video, a recruitment video and a short fantasy film. The development for these projects has been done using various methods of collaboration, both online & offline. I hope to analyse the advantages that these different approaches have in my summary of our video diary entries within a day's time.
