Distributed Production

I’ve been working as an artist for about 16 years now and in that time I’ve collaborated with dozens of people. But it wasn’t until I started using the virtual world, Second Life, that I started to work with people that not only lived in different cities than me but whom I’d also never met in person. Then I started videoblogging and I became friends with many more people from all over the world who I only knew through video, email, IM and Skype. Suddenly, collaborating with anyone on the planet became very possible. And over the last two and a half years not only has it been possible, it's now my daily life as everyone I work with lives in some other time zone.

The one person I work with the most is Ryanne Hodson. Together we run Freevlog, wrote the book Secrets of Videoblogging, and in collaboration with others, started NODE101 and produced the Vloggercon conference. All the while I've lived in San Antonio and Ryanne has moved from New York to San Francisco.

One of the projects that we initiated that I'm most proud of is getting the tutorials on Freevlog translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Japanese. The cool thing about that was that the volunteers who did the translations for us are literally scattered all over the world. What made that collaboration easier was SpinXpress. We were able to create a private group where the translators could drop their audio and video files at any time. Often this was when Ryanne and I were offline or asleep. The way SpinXpress works, the files would be shared with the other people in the group who where online. And then when we were back online, we would get the files from them even if the original person to share the file was no longer online. How cool is that?

That translation project got me thinking of other ways to work with people. That's where Second Life comes in. One of the neat things about Second Life is that you can be in the same "place" as someone else clear across the planet. The other neat thing about Second Life is you can use it to make movies. Aha! By combining the distributed production method we used on the Freevlog translations with the virtual world real-time collaboration of Second Life, I can now create projects that combine the talents of people all over the world as if we were all in the same physical place at the same time. Instead of being limited by realities of geography and time zones, I can choose my collaborators without regard to where they happen to live.

So I've started a new videoblog called When We Were Robots that is shot on location in Second Life. I'm really excited about it because I get to play with some sci-fi ideas I've been kicking around for a long time and I get to work with people all over the world. So please check out the first episode and don't forget to come back here because I'll use my posts on SpinFlow to document the successes, failures and lessons learned from putting it all together.