Our Cities at the Movies: Scoring and Sound Design at the Forefront

Across the globe in Melbourne, the most recent collaboration between DePaul University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) asked students to complete a city photo roman of Chicago, Melbourne or both. The reference was Chris Marker's La Jetée. The collaboration involved teams of students from each school completing various elements of the film. While the team (RMIT and DePaul students combined) created the photo roman, DePaul students scored the photo romans and the RMIT students completed the sound design and final mix. The students met class-to-class through the program and the teams met separately to work on their projects.
Before starting the projects, all students became acquainted through an icebreaker activity, and the project culminated with reflection videos.

Upon completion of this project, students were able to:

Work collaboratively on a photo roman in terms of the client/vendor relationship
Lead to a consensus in terms of problem solving using synchronous and asynchronous approaches
Create a series of accountability strategies
Understand the role and importance of metadata
Receive and give respectful criticism from and to international collaborators
Understand the importance of social skills with long distance collaboration
Be flexible in terms of workflows and timelines
Understand that certain behaviors will be detrimental to the process