06.01.2010 Cultures of Collaboration: Some thoughts
A bit ago, after I arrived in Bath, I was asked to come talk to a class studying collaboration. It didn't occur to me until they asked me, but almost everything I've done artistically has been some sort of collaboration or another. So preparing for the class was helpful to me in that way, but also because it made me sort out my thoughts about collaboration and try to come up with something interesting to say on the topic.
My notes for the lecture, in slightly edited form, are below:
Looking over the collaborative work I've done in the past, and the relationships that have resulted from those working processes, I see them in every case fall into one of two types of collaboration. There's certainly some overlap between the two, but for simplicity I'll call them by the terms 'Creative' & 'Professional'.
A. Creative – collaborating more to co-develop concepts, ideas. Process-based.
B. Professional – collaborating more to seek complimentary skills. Results-based.
Ask for general examples from students. Possibilities:
A. Art installation, Band, Experimental theatre/dance, Indie films (sometimes)
B. Band, Film, Professional theatre/dance
So, B, the 'professional' collaboration, is kind of like taking your car in to a mechanic. You don't have the skills to do that yourself, so you want to hire those skills. Do you want the best person for the job? What if the best person costs one million pounds? Ok, you want the best person for the job — but within your means.
A, the 'creative' collaboration, is more like a compost pile, or making, er, beer or bread. Something that involves micro-organisms, anyway. The idea being that you put the right ingredients together and wait and let whatever happens happen.
Not that a creative collaboration doesn't take work— it takes at least as much work to do A well as to do B well. Everyone has to put in a lot more time into a creative collaboration for it to really be great, is the point. Alternately, a professional collaboration can have radical new ideas or processes in it— that's just not the main point. The main point in that case is producing. Any ingenious solutions you come up with are nice, but at the end of the day not ultimately why everyone's there.
Note that there's crossover. It's possible (theoretically/occasionally/under special circumstance) to have both kinds of collaboration at once. Or (more reasonably) it's possible for certain bands, let's say, or theatre troupes to be "A" collaborations and others to be "B" collaborations. But at any one point you can usually look at an endeavor and place it in one or the other category.
Additionally, with B you tend to have Someone In Charge. There's a "boss" to report to, even if that's downplayed in the day-to-day workings. With A you may have a leader who gets everyone together, and is the sort of "guiding light" but that leader tends to step aside whenever discussion starts and let other ideas carry as much weight as his or her own.
There are some obvious advantages to each approach: A tends to lead to radical new creativity and ideas, B gives polished, presentable results.
I bring all this up, though, and think it's important because lots of problems with collaboration happen when you think you're in one type, but the other party thinks you're in the other. As an example, for one of the first film scores I write, I was hired with a lot of talk about wanting an "experimental" score and giving me lots of freedom to "make a statement" …but when it came down to it, after all the money was spent and the score was recorded, they wanted a very traditional score. Lots of time and energy was spent revising the semi-final score to meet the producer's notes, when really I could have just written the score he wanted in the first place, if he would have approached me with "we want a very traditional score for this film, we've temped it a certain way and we think the temp works." Of course, I might not have been as interested, or I might have asked for more money in that case, because imitating a temp is much less fun than actually writing music. In summary, though: this could have been a really nice collaboration, if everyone involved knew what they wanted from the beginning, and had the communication skills to ask for it directly (I include myself, certainly, in the lack-of-communication department for that project. As the score which they'd initially found fresh and exciting started to dissatisfy them, I let my confusion take over and tried to manage competing advice from the director and producer, instead of trying to get them to all sit down and reëvaluate the first conversation we'd had about music in the film.)
The reverse can happen too: I recorded with a musician once who was amazing, completely ridiculously good player, very precise and delicate and never needed more than one take to do anything. In the studio, though, I found that this person had no patience at all for an "A" collaboration — I was somewhat organized, had charts for all the songs we were doing, but a lot of the details were left wide open. If she asked any question about her part, she wanted an immediate answer, whereas I wanted to hear what each one sounded like, maybe more than once, try it out, give it some thought, etc. Overall this was a good collaboration, but because we weren't on the same page about process, I think it was much more stressful than it needed to be for both of us.
A good collaboration example in Type B: Nearly every film score. It goes like this: there's a director and a producer (often on small films the same person) and they have spent a year on a script, finding money, finding locations, getting permits, shooting an incredibly expensive mile of film, getting it scanned and edited, and are now finally thinking about music. They are terrified that music will destroy their film. As the prospective composer, I reassure them that I want to further their vision, that I love the script, that it's all going to be great. I demo things like crazy until they agree, and we both think the music is doing what the film needs. Then we go into the studio and record as cheaply as we can get something good. I take it home and mix until they're even happier. At no point do I fight with them or act sad if I have to throw out an idea that I love and have spend 20 hours on because they think it's "somehow not quite gelling with the scene". It's their film! Any understanding I have of it is based on a couple of weeks, whereas they've been doing this for probably a year. Even if that means that they have lost all perspective and are making bad decisions, it's their baby and when your baby is a film that means that it's yours to kill. The couple of times when I have thought a director's decision about a certain musical cue is just crazy and wrong, about half the time it turns out that they were right when I watch the film a year later.
Good type A examples abound, but they're harder to talk about in a general sense. In all of them, though, someone has a concept. Ideally everyone involved hangs out, drinks beer, gets to know each other, and then develops some ideas on their own. Then we all reconvene, drink more beer, give feedback, set schedules and repeat the process. The big downside to the type A collaboration is that about half of the time it doesn't actually result in a performance. New work is generated, ideas come up, there's lots of raw material there, but as the whole thing is so open-ended, if there's not a cutoff point or a deadline or a grant with rules about spending, it's easy to just work and work and tweak and then eventually life gets in the way and you have something, but not the completed work you set out to do. My piece "A Capsule Held Static" was written for a project where musicians would write a score first, and then filmmakers would make a film to it. There was a big meeting with beer, I went away and wrote that piece, but then by the time I finished it the grand project had fallen apart. I'd still like to see a film to this music, but it's certainly had a life of its own as a sound-piece.
Each of these types has significant strengths and weaknesses. Theoretically, it should be possible to start as a Type A collaboration, get some radical new ideas, let them germinate or gestate or whatever metaphor, and then convert your team into a Type B collaboration and pump out professional-level work on a budget, meeting all your deadlines. But this hardly ever happens. It's incredibly hard to convert one into the other.
Why might this be difficult? Well, people with very different skill sets sometimes have a hard time speaking the same artistic language. So for them a Type A collaboration would be challenging— those are, most often, made up of people in the same field: experimental theatre troupes, some bands, some dance companies. Also, once a group has a dynamic and habits and has developed a certain way of working together, it's very hard to just say "okay, we're going to change all that now."
There's one other way to have your cake and eat it too, though: Pixar rather famously has creative teams that work like a Type A collaboration — they sit around generating ideas and concepts and scripts. They work on new animation techniques. And then once a project is ready to go, it gets turned over to the "B" people, who follow a Hollywood timeline and get the thing done so that everyone can make a zillion dollars. This works quite well for them, and I think it does so largely because the teams are (a) separate, but with (b) good communication between them. Also rather importantly/famously, the groups are paid the same and are given the same status within the company. So there's not a sense that certain work at the company is "real" creative work or the "real Pixar" and other stuff is just schlock. (The above link is hilarious, but here are two other good articles on Ed Catmull and the culture of creativity there.)
All of this is most important (thanks for reading this far) not because one kind of collaboration is inherently better than the other— they're not— but simply because any collaboration will go better if all parties know what to expect. We're lacking a vocabulary to talk about these differences, and I think that using these, internally or explicitly, will help you navigate future collaborations more smoothly, to see what people want when they don't know how to say what they want, and to respond in creating in a way that will give you the best experience and end product— and hopefully get you called back the next time.
Student exercise: Write down two examples of collaborations you've had. Say which type you think they were and why. Volunteers to share with the class & discuss. What could have helped this be a better collaboration?Next, Write down a creative goal and say what type of collaboration you think it should be, and why.
Questions
Posted by charlie williams at June 1, 2010 02:47 PM
