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.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_FP990301
