We often think of collaboration as what happens when one person invites another to help make a project better. What happens when you collaborate with a crowd? With everyone from professional dancers to strangers on the sidewalk? By expanding our notion of collaboration, we can make a bigger impact — both on and offline. But, how many chefs can you invite into the kitchen before you spoil the soup?
In the creation of Girl Walk // All Day, we embraced collaboration on a wide range of scales, from the individual to the crowd, and across many web platforms. By starting with the mashup musician Girl Talk’s album All Day — an artful collage of the last four decades of pop music — we created a feature-length dance film shot in the streets of New York. Throughout the filmmaking process, we openly sought input and participation from the film’s dancers, our fan-base on the web, Kickstarter backers, and people throughout city. Each of these relationships had a crucial impact in shaping our final film.
By inviting broad participation in all parts of our filmmaking process, we learned how to galvanize a crowd’s excitement without diluting our project’s vision. We continue to use this energy to guide the film’s distribution, inviting followers to influence what the future of the film will look like.