The Slug Life Chose Me

I found today bizarre, but mostly really inspiring and useful. It was amazing to see what a room full of nervous graphic designers, illustrators and animators can create together in an hour when working against a clock and with limited materials. We had to make do with what we had and compromise, and work together using skills that are unique to each of us.

I volunteered to do the music for our commercial for a slug themed theme park, not assuming me and three others would end up doing not only the music but some of the recording and basically all of the editing of the final commercial. The pressure of doing all this combined with the diminishing time frame COMBINED with the fact we had never met or spoken before and suddenly had to compose a .25 speed circus theme song in the toilet on an iPhone app to use alongside imagery of slug-men on a "slowlercoaster" (that's one of my best puns ever I hope it counts for at least one ILO), made for a stressful, productive and hilarious experience and really successful final video. We uploaded the wrong file going into the lecture but we're all confident that had it had the intended soundtrack, we definitely would have won (sorry, dog leather).

I think a lot of us definitely weren't fully engaged with this task at the very beginning as it was a bit of a challenge to start suddenly interacting with new people like a frightened Foundation student again, especially when you're talking about madness like jelly with hats and weather patterns based around sausage meat. I think this headfirst into the swimming pool approach was really useful for me, it allowed me to just not care about meeting people and talk some shit with people while unknowingly simultaneously developing ideas for projects in the back of my mind. Today helped me grasp what collaboration actually involves and it isn't as daunting as I had pictured, because all of us feel the same, there isn't just one rock hard animator ready to crush all our ideas and tell us to get out, everyone has a different thing to contribute, and therefore all of us have a hundred different things that we don't do that we can learn about.