Post Mortem: Cross Discipline Collaborations

Collaboration # 1 - Audio for The Drunken Dragon (Unsuccessful)

In 2017 I went to China to study and improve my language skills for a few months in an immersion program, whilst I was there I met an individual who happened to have finished her BFA in films studies at Ryerson University in Canada. Her specialty was sound design and once I had told her about me going into studying animation she was keen to keep in touch so we could collaborate at some point in the future (and of course to be friends).

Fast forward to my team and I looking for someone to help us with audio for our Aftermath project "The Drunken Dragon" and I realise that this was a great opportunity to contact her. At this point she had just finished the audio for her first feature film and was keen for more. I asked her, and though she noted that she hadn't ever made any "games" audio she was still happy to be on board. For the group to communicate with her more easily I added her to our chat on Facebook which was dedicated for audio for our project so she wouldn't have to get all confused about our discussion of assets and so on. We explained to her the overall theme and atmosphere we were trying to communicate with our Aftermath environment. Moreover I made a list of sounds I thought we would need and she also put in a few suggestions for white noise and so on. I don't think we were very clear on when we wanted her to give us the sound by but managed to provide a variety of sounds for us easily and swiftly.

I took responsibility to input the audio within the project, though this proved to be more of a challenge than I had initially anticipated and failed to successfully input the audio into the final project. I think next time I do a collaboration where I'm not so familiar with the medium it's probably best to leave more time for it as well as ask for more help to do it.

Collaboration # 2- Album Cover for "The Jang" (Successful)

Making these album covers were a bit of a safety net in case I wasn't able to find any other cross discipline projects or in case any projects didn't follow through. I extended my availability to do projects through posting on the SAE interdisciplinary Facebook page and a few audio students reached out to me to do album covers for their EPs.

For "The Jang" the student I collaborated with (Alice Headlam) sent me a link to the band's page and we discussed potential ideas and then I drafted a few ideas with a darker but simple theme in mind. Since it was a rather quick and easy job for myself I got the final product to Alice easily.

Being a medium I was comfortable with, I got through the workflow easily. The only problems I really had was waiting for the ink to dry which is a downside when you don't own a heat gun or hair drier. Next time I do a similar project I think it'd be best to leave a bit more time to execute more ideas to give more options.

Collaboration # 3 - Album Cover for "Video Avenue" (Successful)

This album cover was a bit more tedious to complete as there were many layers to the composition to consider. When I posted on the interdisciplinary page I uploaded a number of examples of my artworks. The student I collaborated with (James Walmsley) expressed his liking for the style I executed in this piece (below, left) and he briefly explained the genre of the music and what he wanted but also told me he wanted to give me full creative freedom. I ended up taking a lot of inspiration from my painting he liked and piggy backed off the style.

I was happy with how the final product turned out, having patience was probably the best thing I could have for this particular piece as it took many layers of water colour to get a decent saturation of colour. Again next time I would leave more time to make more variety of options.