Yesterday we looked at how Google Wave (a new product that is part email, part IM, part something entirely new) is being used as an educational tool. In this post we explore if and how Wave is being used by the artistic community. This topic was suggested by Cory Huff, a commenter on the first post, who noted: “I’ve been looking for artists to Wave with, as I think artistic collaboration has some possibilities.”
We discovered that there is excitement about the potential for artistic collaboration using Wave. However the level of actual collaboration activity is still very low. Here’s what we found…
Wave & The Arts
We saw in yesterday’s post that Wave is being used by educators mostly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. For artists, there is similar potential to use Wave as a collaborative creative tool. Cory Huff suggested a real time painting app that allows visual artists to work together on a new project, or an event planning tool for Art events.
Right now, there doesn’t appear to be much artistic activity on Wave. The closest we could find was a public wave called ‘Artists Wave,’ created by Fernando Fonseca and others. That wave lists some videos, pictures and music works – which at least shows off Wave’s multimedia features. However there was little evidence of collaboration, for example more than one person creating a new piece of art.
Wave & Filmmaking
There was more activity in Wave around filmmaking. Jonathan Poritsky wrote a post back in June outlining his thoughts on how Wave could streamline the movie-making process – specifically, post production workflows. He’s now made that post into a wave called ‘Google Wave for Filmmakers: Wave Edition.’
The following chart depicts how Poritsky conceptually sees Wave being used in filmmaking. In a nutshell, all of the participants in the filmmaking process would use Wave to collaborate. In Poritsky’s words, “every job and step passes through the wave.”
Poritsky admits that “not all of this is possible yet,” because it requires faster computers and network technology to process such large video files in real-time. However he says that “the basic precepts of digital editing could actually be done over a network today.”
Ultimately Poritsky is bullish on using Wave in filmmaking because “cinema is a collaborative art form.” He cites the huge credits list at the end of every movie as proof of that.
Sanctuary: Short Film Using Wave
An early example of a filmmaking wave is a short film called Sanctuary. Their wave is entitled ‘Sanctuary – remixable film – dev wave.’
Sanctuary is a “re-mixable Science fiction film” directed by Michela Ledwidge. It’s been in production for a number of years, due to budget issues. The film is currently in post-production and Ledwidge is attempting to use Wave to assist with that process.
Wave has a couple of geeky features that may be used by the Sanctuary team. One is ‘gadgets,’ which are add-ons similar to the mini web applications you can install in your Firefox browser. Sanctuary is looking for two gadgets: a Shot tracker UI
and a “Production lingo translator.”
Another feature of Wave is ‘robots.’ These are automated participants on a wave. A robot, according to Google, “can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave’s contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves.” Sanctuary is looking for the following two robots: an “AI character bot” and a “trac notifications integration” (to show different shots from the movie).
As of now, the Sanctuary wave doesn’t have much collaboration around the actual film in it – but this may change if the desired gadgets and robots get developed and deployed.
Conclusion
It’s clearly early days for the artistic community in Wave. There’s a fair bit of discussion on possible uses for Wave, mostly around collaborating on artistic projects. But not much actual collaboration on projects happening yet.
Filmmaking appears to be the most likely to gain traction in the short-medium term. So we’ll check back on progress in 6-12 months.
