La creation du monde: When a community of practice collaborates

Live projects and complex interdisciplinary collaborations enrich learners’ experiences of their courses and their own creative practice. Opportunities for collaborative working that lie outside the curriculum of a course are to be welcomed and sought proactively. That said, collaborative projects bring with them complex logistical challenges for busy course teams and their cohorts. How to balance invaluable opportunities for extra-curricular experience and collaborative working with the exigencies of delivering existing modules? When the students, alumni and staff of BA (Hons) CG Arts & Animation were challenged, as part of an EU Interreg/ACT partnership project, to create an original sixteen minute animation to be synched with a live performance of classical music, the course team looked to its network of course blogs and ‘community of practice’ as the means by which the collaboration might be facilitated. The successful execution of the brief was achieved by the community demonstrating the characteristics of a community of practice as set out by Wenger (c.2006). The shared domain of interest provided a fertile environment within which to cultivate ideas, while the strong sense of community and skills of the practitioners enabled the rapid and distributed production of a complex visual composition. This presentation explains the creative process that led to the realisation of La Creation du Monde, illustrating the power of a creative community of practice