curious about collaborations

[ratcreature]

Are there any forums or communities for organizing author/artist collaborations that are not Big Bangs (or Reverse Big Bangs)? Like say a notice board where authors announce describe their WIPs and express an interest in getting a cover made or illustrations or any number of things (say a pretty map for your story with a quest or other world building stuff), or artists can post what they'd have an interest in illustrating or maybe propose their project ideas that would need an author as well as art, and then people could comment and find each other?

Comments

[yue_ix]

I've done similar things in 3 occasions, within certain spaces, but it wasn't always intended to go the way you describe it here.

With imaginarybeasts, each book is launched as a theme, and people can sign up as a writer, an artist, or as an illustrator. The illustrators are officially described along the lines of 'sign up here if you want to illustrates someone else's story', which would look like a Big Bang, though out of the few times I signed up, a couple of times authors contacted me with 'I want to start from scratch with you. Do you have any ideas we can play with? Here's mine', which would fall under your project. (It was, by the way, lovely with some people, and a bad experience only with one person,who wanted it 'BB style'. But in general people were nice about all this and we respected each other's creativity.)

I've only done artword once, as the camelot_fleet's artword project, and though that never got finished, it was rather lovely too. Not every team started out with the mindset of 'creating something new together' and instead defaulted to 'I'll do something then you do yours and we'll see' due to communication problems, lack of ideas, or simply preferred way of doing things. I think that's okay, and is bound to happen in any such project, even if full collaboration from the start was to be encouraged most. So while my team went for that (even if we ended up splitting a bit), not all teams did. There were other problems linked to multifandomness, LJ-DW exchanges, lack of follow-up and mis-communications involved in this challenge from a moderator's POV though, so while I've enjoyed it (even though we weren't able to complete our piece) if it was to be redone it'd be held differently. =)

The third space where I was able to do this thing is in my own space - by leaving notes in my journal/on meme prompts/on other's journals that I'd love such collabs, and having people get back to me about it when they are interested. It has happened, of course, in RL time with friends being physically present in the same room and us all doing related fanworks at once, or doing something similar while chatting/skyping/video conferencing. That's very individualistic though and rather lacks any form of order or set-up. Most sessions do not end up productive, what with everyone distracting each other, and often results in complete crack.

It would be really nice if there was a centralized space to host such 'collaboration permission'. It could be in the way some spaces are presently done for artists or authors to leave blanket or specific permissions to make fanworks of their fanworks (such as podfic of fanart permissions). My comm Drawmelot has such a post for artists to leave permissions for authors to write things based on their works, and would allow anyone posting about them being open to collabs, but doesn't have such a post right now. I had hope that merlin_ficart would end up not unlike your idea but so far it seems to have leaned more towards the do-one-part-then-I'll-work-with-that side of collabs. I'm uncertain how that kind of thing can be avoided, considering how much people are used to that way of doing things.

All that said, it'd be a great thing to try, imo, especially with as many types of medium mixing as can be lured in. ^__^

[ratcreature]

I think the major problems with setting up a collaboration space would be what I mentioned to tassoss above. First, you would need a fairly large pool of writers and artists to have a chance that you actually find someone interested in your idea, even more if it was multi-fandom, and it would be hard for the comm not to die off in the initial phase (like artondemand where people could ask for art, that never really took off). Then there is the social problem of rejecting collaboration offers, and the problem of this kind of think making popularity even more visible.

I mean, it can be rather daunting to put yourself out like that when matching is not more or less guaranteed like it is in Big Bangs and fests like that. For example I have asked once in my journal whether someone would be interested in doing some writing for an idea I had, and well, it just got no reaction. In part it was probably just a problem of too small an audience pool to find someone, but otoh it's even scarier to ask something like that in big comm and then still have nobody interested.