What's The Score? An Immersive, Trans-Atlantic Collaboration.

Description

After a century of shared practice, can digital spaces enable new interactions between musicians and filmmakers that decrease anxiety and isolation and create experimental, immersive and more human online collaboration?

Takeaway

The audience will witness the production process through the collated digital experiences of the students documented through social media, a live demonstration of the technique and the outcomes of the experimentation.

Abstract

For a hundred years, our disciplines have shared a common trajectory, with filmmaking and music production forged from analogue technology impacted significantly by digitalisation in the late 20th century. Though mostly a democratising disruption, we note a loss of some collaboration across our disciplines. Face-to-face discussion and hands on involvement between composers and filmmakers has been replaced by isolated production and the mere exchanging of files: "here's my finished film, please put some music on it", recreating bad practices from the analog world. This isolation has caused an increase in fears, anxiety and a general lack of collaboration in the creative process.

This project intends to explore how digital technologies can mitigate these fears around collaboration, decrease isolation in the creative process, and assist in creating a new collaborative identity. Specifically, it will utilise digital spaces to enable a live collaboration between filmmakers at UAL and musicians at PSU. The work will involve discussion and planning online and then a live-streamed film production from London, scored live from Pennsylvania.

Prior to digital technology, filmmakers and musicians worked both collaboratively and independently at various stages of the creation process. Typically filmmakers and musicians were aware of the overall storyline and it was not uncommon for composers to be live “on set” to gain a broader understanding of the vision and intricacies of the filming process and for the filmmaker to be present from conception of the musical score through live rehearsal with instrumentalists. This was and is considered true collaborative work, with each partner contributing not just to their product but to the overall vision of the work.

This projects intends to recreate this traditional collaboration. Through the use of digital technology, we have the ability to work side-by-side throughout the creative process (even from different parts of the world) with musicians on-set during filming and film-makers present during the the musical scorning.

But digital spaces are now potentially more human and intimate than ever before - have we yet to fully harness their possibilities to augment the process further?

Through technologies such as virtual and augmented reality and motion mapping we can go beyond live-streaming to create a truly immersive collaborative space. For example, our students could share beats and rhythms physically through wearable devices - influencing and co-creating pacing, timing, and sequencing of the film making, which creates collaboration from the mindsets of filmmakers and musicians, combined in the moment.

Led by student discussion of platforms and apps, this project will encourage creativity across a digital and physical space, leading potentially to best practices for modern collaboration, including communication, improvisation, sharing of ideas, and collective construction. We hope the outcomes will promote digital wellbeing, openness and collaborative practice and begin to further develop a discourse around creative collaboration, improvisation and openness.