Spinflow Series::Tracing the Spiral of Inspiration

One of the things I love about this interview with Anders Clerwall is his candor about the discomfort he finds in collaboration. I had no idea he felt that way since his first musical response to the mere suggestion that Road Node 101 needed a theme song arrived within twenty-four hours.

It is the immediacy of the impulse and action that particularly interest me.

Anders easily mentions every major emotional point upon which folks typically get hung up in trying to climb into the collaborative process. The good news is that there are exercises to get over these nasty barbs of ego, expectation and control.

As with all the interviewees so far, my only question to Anders Clerwall was, "Tell me about the moment you knew you would act to create something for Road Node 101."

Making media with remote subjects involves a great lot of interviewer flexibility since everyone's got a different setup and level of technical capacity. Because I wanted Anders' fresh, unedited response, we settled how we'd record his side of the conversation before the question was mentioned. Anders chose to videotape his answer without me 'there' except to the extent that we kept an iChat channel open between us. Needless to say, once he said he was about to set about recording, I kept my iChat mouth shut so I shouldn't risk ruining a good take.

Anders also chose the method of transmission of the compressed / unedited interview, and that choice was to upload the footage via FTP to one of his own hosts since his firewall settings had changed and he was unable to connect to SpinXpress without effort. Aw! I hate when that happens.

It makes sense that in the event of even a scant bit of frustration users will default to Plan B, or Plan C, or invent another plan altogether. Most important throughout the collaborative process is to maintain FLOW.

You'll hear behind the interview two versions of the Road Node 101 Theme song; a first draft and the finished version, written by Anders Clerwall and eventually performed with Max and Alex Ward. These musical elements were originally shared with SpinXpress to great effect. When it works, it works.

After our recent collaboration using SpinXpress Joel Carner wrote, "I love it! I love it! The interview is great...and I love SpinXpress, that we can view the viewos and share online will help collaboration efforts everywhere!"

I'm just saying.