This week marks the end of Semester One, and with it a collaborative production! This entire subject has been a really great learning experience for me, and although not everything ran as smoothly as I would have liked for it to, that's just how these things go sometimes.
Project 1, a failed collaboration with a florist.
I reached out to a newly-opened florist and friend of Christie, Angel from Amazing Graze Flowers. I brought forward some ideas for some care-cards for bouquets (thanks Christie for that idea!) and some small animations using her bouquets for advertisement purposes.
Unfortunately, after a few email correspondences I stopped receiving replies from her and needed to seek out alternative projects. I can only assume that she didn't like my work, which is fair enough
On a more positive note, I'm keen to take the idea of care-cards that I develop independently to other florists, and create plant care zines (another excellent idea from Christie).
Project 2, an ode to weird internet occupants
This collaboration was significantly less professional but much, much more successful! Organised by Melbourne artist, Allie (@emilia_fart_but_in_pink on Instagram), this project was a collaboration of 16 artists creating art based on the same image of my icon, Emilia Fart.
The project took place over the span of 5 weeks, with not much collaboration other than the original organisation and idea for the artworks. The final products can be viewed here.
I picked up this project after the beginning of Project 3, but this one was more of a passion piece than particularly for this class. I'm still talking about it here though, because collaboration is collaboration. Because this was such a relaxed project, I ended up putting off the painting of this piece until the very last day, and then I painted for 14 straight hours.
That's not to say that the end result was without any hiccups!
When I went to do the underdrawing of my painting, I had one pencil at my disposal, a blunt, pink pencil, and no eraser. That shook things up a little!
Also, Allie and I were the only two artists who were from Australia and so we were very much out of the loop of American social controversies, and after releasing the artworks there was surprising a bit of backlash against our acknowledgment of the existence of Trisha Paytas (the left-most woman). Not that I didn't agree with the people, but it's difficult to discuss with your collaborators "whether or not something is racist" when you're the only person of colour.
Overall, this project was a fun one, and I'm keen to collaborate with Allie on small things and maybe animations in the future.
Project 3, a Dream Ballet (and a bit of a dreamboat!)
After my project with Angel fell through, I was a bit desperate for a project. Seamus was already done with his after using the work done for the Sustainability conference in Argentina, and I was cursing myself for not doing the same! I had created two short animations for them after all, but I decided to use the work I offered to do for composer, Emma Maguire, as my collaborative production. That way I could justify spending as much time as I needed with it.
Emma came to us early in the semester seeking animation work for her third year final project, a 15 minute EP, and honestly, working with Tristan and Emma was a bit of a dream.
Emma is wonderful to work for and with. She is receptive to ideas, extremely creative, and open to conversation and meetings. Tristan and I met with Emma four or five times over the semester hauling laptops and drinking coffees at a local cafe. We also communicated by text and by emails.
Tristan and I work extremely well together. It's very easy to communicate and provide frequent feedback and reassurance when you sit within 2 metres of the person you're collaborating with. I don't think any of us could have done this project alone, not because of the scale of the project, but because Tristan understands how much work is too much and I can push us to do more and better. I'd like to think I was really a positive driving force for this project.
To represent our collaboration anecdotally...
Emma asks for something that is clearly too much work from me and immediately say 'yes' because I'm weak (and she is very, very cute) and Tristan immediately follows that up with 'no, that's too much'.
This is not to say that I don't know when something is actually achievable and I know I can push towards.
Nothing has really gone wrong with this project, and I think that's thanks to the work ethic shown by the three of us, as well as our communication.
It was a little bit stressful and daunting due to the sheer size of the project but at the moment, with 13 days until we need to submit our work, the workload feels like something we can accomplish.