In the book, Group Genius, Keith Sawyer explores the collaborative dimensions of creativity. He focuses especially on the performance aspect of improvisation, and the ways they relate to innovation. Here you can see some improvisation with this presentation. Putting together a demonstration of this is what I did in my class involves a fair amount of collaborative improvisation.
[00:34]
I'm looking around. I've collected a lot of materials. And here I'm going to link to a screencast that has been put together by Sara Brady. In Sarah's screencast, she also improvises as she reflects on the creation of a screencast.
[00:52]
[Transition to "Final Portfolio Screencast," by Sarah Brady]
[Transcript of "Final Portfolio Screencast":]
When I thought back over the English 150 projects that we have completed this semester and considered which one I wanted to do for my portfolio performance, only one really stood out at me and that was the screencast that we had just completed. Part of that might be because I have worked with so many of the other projects so much that I'm a little bit tired of working with them. But part of it is also because I really like the Camtasia Studio software and I'm really looking forward to playing with it again. And also I kind of like the idea of doing a screencsast about a screencast since this class is about postmodernist fiction and it is like a self-referential, meta idea. So, I hope you enjoy my screencast of a screencast.
[01:43]
When I first downloaded and opened Camtasia Studio, the first thing I did was play around with the software a little bit: "Testing. Is this recording? Hello, hello."
And I wasn't even sure that I wanted to use voice narration because I like the mashups that had been put up previously with just, you know, like hints about what the theme might be about, that were kind of vague and let you draw your own conclusions. But after doing a lot of my screencast I realized that I kind of needed the voice narration even though I felt like I was kind of shoving it in peoples' faces: "this is what I mean, Elijah does have this little connection to Eli in the Road." But my point was really unclear without the narration, so I decided to go for it.
[02:30]
I added music to my screencast because I thought it added an eery feel and I chose something without any words that would just kind of be playing in the background. Radiohead's "Treefingers" worked pretty well, so I put that in.
Then I had to start thinking about what I was going to be doing for my images in the screencast. And the first couple of things were pretty easy because I was jut talking about Eli as a character and Elijah the profit as a character. So I typed out a few passages from the book. I put up a picture of what I would figure Eli to look like, and then a couple Biblical pictures of Elija the prophet.
[03:03]
So at first I had all pictures and then I decided that I wanted a different form of media. So I chose to incorporate the screen version of The Road. So I went to YouTube and I found a trailer for The Road and ripped it from YouTube using Zamzar, and imported it into Camtasia and took out the audio. And I was just kind of lucky that they happened to show Eli in the trailer because I don't know otherwise how I would have gotten him.
[03:32]
And my screencast pretty much fell together from there. I'll admit that I had a few technical issues, but once I figured out how to incorporate images with my voiceover and my underlying music, I pretty much had the feel of the screencast and could figure it out from there.
[03:49]
However, that's not to say I didn't have problems of my own. Having a cold was especially nonhelpful. [Sneezes] "I don't know what I'm saying. Why are you recording in the wrong spot? Why do I say 'um' so much? Oh shit. Um, the main point of the. . . . [phone rings] Ugh. I don't understand this program at all. [Sneezes] Um, Eli is the first person the man and the boy have sustained contact with. Huh. With whom the man and the boy have sustained contact with. [Sneezes] [Indecipherable] However, that's not. . . . Oh, don't listen to me."
[Roommate:] "I'm not."
[04:30]
So I think all those bloopers pretty accurately sum up the frustrations I have had and the fact that I'm putting them in shows the sense of humor that I can have about my sometimes sketchy technological skills and sometimes the frustrations that I've had with this project. But I really think that over the course of the semester I've grown both as a writer and as someone who used to be totally incompetent with technology and now can put together a somewhat decent screencast. So I hope that this project represents that and I hope you enjoyed watching.
[End of Final Portfolio Screencast]
[05:10]
Improvised performances are clearly linked with creativity. And Sarah's screencast shows how they are also linked with composing and with learning