This paper updates the results of a series of experiments on online filmmaking and distributed creativity, which are taking place mainly in the Practicum course of the online Degree of Communication of the Open University of Catalonia. In this initiative, we took advantage of our ongoing research in participatory filmmaking[1], [2] and crowdsourcing in cinema[3], [4], [5]. Furthermore, we have applied our experience in the design of collaborative creative environments and tools[6], where we focus on stimulating cross-disciplinary social skills to understand and solve complex problems through co-creation[7], considering that online environments are particularly suited for the collaborative construction of knowledge and learning.[8]

Institutional Background and Project Justification

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, from now on UOC), established in 1995 and based in Barcelona, is one of the first Online Universities, with a strong commitment to internationalization. The UOC began teaching a Degree on Audiovisual Communication in 2002 (one of the authors was the designer of its syllabus). In 2009, a new Degree in Communication, adapted to the requirements of the European Higher Education Area, was designed. Drawing from the experience from the previous degree and taking advantage of the enormous technological, social, and cultural advancements for online creativity at all levels, different initiatives have been fostered to turn the challenges for media creation in an online environment into advantages for collaborative work and innovation. In the Audiovisual Communication degree, we use mainly three key strategies for content creation:

• Shared resources through creation, editing, and remixing of CC-licensed raw material.
• Transdisciplinary online spaces for production and direction through teamwork.
• Personalized guidance for individual short format production and longer format projects.

In the new Degree in Communication, the Practicum subject added further emphasis on collaboration and sharing skills and content through a practice-based and professionalized environment, plus visual tools for oral presentation. For our purposes, instead of focusing on personal projects under the guidance of a professional expert, we developed a collective project defined in specific but still broad terms that focused on both collaboration and creativity. The main challenge for a coordinated online filmmaking project is the physical distance between participants. Therefore, a sort of distributed creativity strategy seemed like the more convenient way to go. From there, we had to choose between two possibilities:

• A single project/team with task specialization.
• A project made of multiple pieces and teams.

We chose the second possibility to test the wider range of skills possible. After weighing the option of developing a documentary under a common subject/topic, we opted to undertake an experiment with fiction due to its complexity. Fiction allowed us to work more fully in all the key elements from screenwriting to preproduction, shooting and postproduction. Our goal was to combine creativity with a series of well-defined specifications in terms of conceptualization, format and production values.

Therefore, we opted for a collaborative endeavor based on distributed creativity, and we designed a premise in the form of a networked and distributed narrative.[9]

The Premise: Description and Justification

A man/woman wakes up in a hotel room. New place. New body. On the bedside table, an envelope with the instructions for the day, some pills, a cell phone, a gun, and another closed envelope only to be opened in case of an emergency. In the wardrobe, as usual, the same kind of functional clothes. She still remembers the first day of this nightmare.

This is the first paragraph of the narrative premise of The Awakening, part one of the two documents we gave to students on the first day of the course. This was a way to raise expectations and to set the tone for the final product, while keeping it open to interpretation. The full activity document was structured as follows:

• Overview of the job and work methodology.
• Narrative premise (excerpt above).
• Format of the final product.
• Suggested questions as inspiration.

Once we presented the open fictional world premise, we asked our students to individually elaborate a short script within this shared universe: all together would eventually end up forming a longer short episodic movie. Actual plot, genre, and visual approach were left open, as long as every piece was coherent with the premise and some broad tech specifications. Thus, before creating the first version of the scripts, students shared their vision of the fictional world, foresaw possible development challenges, and shared their own synopses in the virtual classroom. Once they wrote the first drafts, they were distributed for random peer evaluation, thus securing coherence with the premise “rules” and assessing possible production issues for a “no budget” production. Consequently, even if the original author wrote the second draft, it was already a fruit of a participatory process through peer feedback on the script. In consequence, the original author took responsibility of shooting and editing processes with a team of her choice, under supervision of tutors, who provided general feedback and facilitated filmmaking equipment if needed. In the end, each student was writer/director of her own original story (3–5 minutes at most) and had engaged in a peer’s project as script reviewer. Finally, edited versions were collectively assessed and overall order of the pieces were decided.

An additional support document detailed tasks to be developed, timing and calendar. As the term lasts four months, we defined the following structure:

Although the project demanded a continuous process of dialogue between students and tutor, three partial assessment milestones were proposed (marked in Table 1): first script (A1), pre-production pack (A2), including definitive literary and technical scripts (plus any other possible support material) and final edited version (A3).

Pilot Experience

For the pilot experience, we worked with a reduced group of five students, with both authors acting as tutors. It is important to note that we had written more background story than it was given to students: it helped us to have a bigger picture of the narrative without compromising creativity. In broad terms, planning was maintained and we observed the following main issues:

• Understanding the project’s overall aim was difficult, and was the object of most of the initial questions.
• The concept was not much discussed nor challenged, but we got some suggestions and interpretations prior to script development. Some of them diverged from our “hidden” background story (for instance: one idea revolved around AI, which was completely unrelated), but we decided to keep them as they opened the concept in unexpected ways, thus prioritizing creative freedom.
• We discussed whether to allow students to shoot their own written material or to pass it to another colleague to emphasize its dimension of professional teamwork rather than individual effort. Being a pilot experience, we decided to let them keep full control over their own material.
• Students shot their pieces with their own equipment.
• We emphasized the importance of working with a collaborative revision platform like Frame.io or Vimeo Pro, which allows to carry out remote team work activities like sharing, commenting, and editing all kind of materials and tasks related to the audiovisual creation (storyboards, stills, script, raw material, etc.) as well as group editing in real time.

Figure 1. Still from “The Decision.”

Feedback and Future Development

Feedback from students, collated from a survey at the end of the process, was mainly positive. The most remarkable observations were those related to peer collaboration, learning process, fun, guidance, professionalization, challenging nature, diversity of approaches and development from a single shared premise and creative freedom. Negative comments focused on organizational hurdles, time and plot constraints, dilution of initial premise in some cases, and uneven production means and needs. For future editions, participants suggested lesser constraints in some aspects (i.e. running time), more delimitation on others (i.e. maximum number of actors), and shooting other peers’ scripts. Curiously, there were different perceptions regarding whether there should be a tight initial premise or not, but there was an agreement that a shared premise helped the collaborative creative process.

Figure 2. Still from “25 Assignments.”

From our academic perspective, although the main idea was to achieve a collective work grounded in a common premise, we found important issues to achieving narrative coherence in a natural way. This had to do, in part, with our students’ different backgrounds and diverse prior skills, professional experience, or academic itinerary (this course is part of the final stage of a general Communication degree, not necessarily focused on audiovisual creation). Thus, we faced some problems with students with low experience but high expectations on the results, which could not be achieved taking into account the course competences and expected learning results.

On the other hand, we had to deal with a variable number of students. From our experience, we observed that a minimum should be about five students in each classroom. This number was not always achieved: as more students opted for external practices in companies we had to adapt the methodology, becoming less collaborative and more autonomous.

Further on, one of the main problems which we faced in The Awakening’s process was the students’ tendency to focus on the overall concept and individual script. Even if they understood the concept theoretically, they found difficult to conceive their own story as part of a collective narrative experiment with a common outcome. The initial premise/idea allowed the students to understand the work as different interpretations of a narrative situation. The outcome tended to be a mixture of parts revolving around the same idea rather than a complete narrative experiment. The difficulty lied in understanding the work as a unique product that experimented with the creation of a whole narrative.

We concluded that more time should be spent on working on how the different segments could talk to each other, and the importance of discussing the issue of the individual work versus collective pieces. Finished pieces did not always feel like part of a single project. This was made obvious through the frequent impulse to establish some sort of closure or explanation. Thus, the have continued working on a theoretical level on open narratives and how to interweave stories as a part of a collective effort.

Another issue was the inevitable differences in skills and resources when working in a distributed way: from access to recording, camera supports, lighting, or sound equipment to actors or support team (physical distance will make the possibility of creating teams among students difficult and uneven depending on the area of residence). This made results extremely varied in terms of technical visual quality (this is less of a problem with new generations of smartphones), but also sound and actor direction. In order to achieve a more homogeneous approach some further technical and aesthetic specifications should be added, as more time for revisions and reshoots. In order to overcome the acting issue, we planned to drive a pool of amateur actors forward, among the more than 70,000 students from the UOC community who could be willing to collaborate in short projects, but it had to be discarded due to organizational complexities.

Figure 3. Still from “Creativity Exercise.”

After two years working on The Awakening’s methodology, we re-designed it and shifted to a more simplified progressive assignment system, where students were asked to produce short works emphasizing different aspects, like mise en scène, micro-documentary or found footage techniques, ending with an open exercise. We have achieved interesting results through this iteration of short assignments, as they allow for testing and refining skills towards the final exercise. Due to the pandemic situation and the expectation of an increase in student numbers, we are considering merging both approaches in the near future.

The Awakening experience has informed other courses focused on short creation and transmedia storytelling. Thus, in a Master in Fantasy and Horror Fiction, we produced a series of short found footage pieces under the moniker The Ghost Network as a part of an imaginary assignment for a production company. It took the shape of a challenge in which each student had to create a short, found footage video that was uploaded to a shared space, using the platform Padlet. Again, there was an attempt to achieve a kind of formal homogeneity to a specific format and adding the possibility of sharing and commenting on other people’s work. The issue was not technology but an adequate understanding of the codes of the format: even if students knew what a found footage snippet looked like, they sometimes ended up being lured into making a short, that is, using standard fiction resources like invisible editing, character acting, or fictional script driving towards closure. So again, it is important to devote time to discuss collectively formal aspects to interiorize what it means to design, shoot, and assemble a found footage piece.

Conclusion

The Awakening and similar experiences have proved extremely fruitful and motivational training for online audiovisual production around a unique kind of product, fostering teamwork, creativity, and innovation. In our experience, focus must be made not only on production (relying on previous basic courses), but also on a common theoretical understanding of a format oriented to a shared and open outcome. Additionally, it is important to understand limitations, not only technical but also expressive: actors, for instance, are an essential asset in delivering the desired performances. Micro-assignments as a way of honing skills has led us to better results, but ultimately, time constraints demand finding a balance between conceptual discussion (format and work methodology), micro-training, and the actual production process.

Antoni Roig is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in the Information and Communication Sciences Department. His research has been connected to the different ways of opening creative processes in digital media production. He has been writing, from a critical point of view, about participatory culture in video sharing sites, videogames, fandom (particularly related to fan movies), machinima, collaborative filmmaking, and transmedia experiences, as well as on crowdsourcing and crowdfunding in filmmaking projects. He has also been writing about practice theory in community-based filmmaking processes.

Talia Leibovitz is a PhD candidate in the Information and Knowledge Society program at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Her research in Film Studies focuses on cultural production and collaborative practices in the digital era. She is a part of the research group MEDIACCIONES at the UOC. She has also directed several documentaries and short films.

1. Roig, Antoni. Cine en conexión: producción cultural y social en la era cross-media. (Barcelona: Editorial UOC, 2009). ↑

2. Roig, Antoni. “Participatory Filmmaking as Media Practice”. International Journal of Communication 7. (2013). http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1593/1013 ↑

3. Roig, Antoni; Sánchez-Navarro, Jordi and Leibovitz, Talia. “¡Esta película la hacemos entre todos! Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding como prácticas colaborativas en la producción audiovisual contemporánea”. Revista Icono14 10-1 (2012). https://doi.org/10.7195/ri14.v10i1.113 ↑

4. Roig, Antoni, Jordi Sánchez-Navarro, and Leibovitz, Talia. "Multitudes creativas. El crowdsourcing como modelo para la producción audiovisual colectiva en el ámbito cinematográfico”. El profesional de la información (EPI) 26-2: 238-248 (2017) https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2017.mar.10 ↑

5. Leibovitz, Talia; Roig, Antoni and Sánchez-Navarro, Jordi. “Collaboration and Crowdfunding in Contemporary Audiovisual Production: The Role of Rewards and Motivations for Collaboration”. In Cinergie, il cinema e le altre arti 4 (2013). http://www.cinergie.it/?p=3214 ↑

6. Creus, Amalia; Ornellas, Adriana, Lalueza, Ferran, Roig Antoni, “Learning and Creating in Peers: Analyzing Students’ Experience in Two Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments”. In European Conference in the Applications of Enabling Technologies. Glasgow, November 20-21 (2014). ↑

7. Gros Salvat, Begoña; Lara-Navarra, Pablo; García González, Iolanda; Mas García, Xavier López Ruiz, Jose; Maniega-Legarda, David and Martínez, Toni. The UOC’s Educational Model: Evolution and Future Perspectives. Universidad Oberta de Catalunya (2009). http://hdl.handle.net/10609/7263 ↑

8. Luther, Kurth; Caine, Kelly; Ziegler, Kevin and Bruckman, Amy. “Why It Works (When It Works): Success Factors in Online Creative Collaboration”. In Proc. Int. Conf. Supporting Group Work (GROUP), 1–10. ACM, New York (2010) https://doi.org/10.1145/1880071.1880073 ↑

9. Walker, Jill. “Distributed Narratives: Telling Stories Across Networks”. Presented at AoIR 5.0, Bristol, 2012. http://jilltxt.net/txt/Walker-AoIR-3500words.pdf ↑