Atlanta’s e-Collab Fair 2022
Last Friday, April 8th we were able to experience Atlanta’s virtual Collaboration Fair. But you might be wondering, what is a collaboration fair? Similar to a Club Fair and SCAD’s Career Fair, in this event students from Digital Media majors get to pitch their projects and recruit other students to work on their films. It is an amazing opportunity to network and collaborate with other people from multiple majors. In addition to projects, clubs and student organizations also have a space in the fair to share what they do.
Usually, this event is held in person but because of the pandemic the past few years the collab fair has been held virtually using multiple platforms such as Discord, Zoom, and YouTube. This year’s collaboration fair was done through Zoom. Each director for each respective film had its own Zoom Room (virtual table) where they pitched the work to attendees. To keep this fair more organized, there was a Help-Desk Zoom Room where guests could join and ask questions if they were not sure where to start.
Each host was responsible to share rich information regarding their film. Presentations, color script images, and animatics were all part of this very insightful collaborative event. Also, every team was responsible for sharing a Google Form or a document to keep track of all the people that were interested in working on the project. Every film was unique and beautiful on its way. These were a few of the projects and clubs that participated in this event:
- Siggraph Club 15) The Future and Robot
- Purgatory 16) Baklava
- Stay Awake 17) Spectral Spectable
- Leonardo il Gatto e Mona Lisa 18) Delivery
- Reverse 19) Reverse
- For Ever 20) For Ever
- Jumbo 21) Jumbo
- Overcome 22) Tsomgo
- Electra Wasp 23) Revery Time
- Panic 24) ArtyMess
- Crossing Over 25) Garg!
- Harvest 26) Nature’s Bounty
- Warrior 27) Whiskers
- Eye Can’t
We, RenderQ, as a Student Media Organization, had the opportunity of participating and hosting our own table. Even though the virtual traffic was a little slow for us, we got to connect with students from Atlanta by hosting interviews and joining the Collab Fair Discord. In future articles, we will be sharing details regarding these insightful interviews.
Based on a survey from many of the students that were involved with the Collab Fair who were looking to bring other people onto their projects, they said that they had been to the Collab Fair before and said that it is always a great way to meet new students. Many of them even said that this Collab Fair was the best one that they’ve been to! Here are what some of the students said:
“Collab fair is a great way to get to know others in the Animation program and see what SCAD is producing at any given time.”
“As a director we had small and great success. This most recent collab fair is best we’ve ever done. I love getting able to interact and to get to know other students and animators.”
“We always have a great turnout and meet a lot of new students so in the past we’ve always considered it a success !”
Other students who had never been at the Collab Fair hosting a table mentioned that it was a great experience to meet other students and to learn about the other projects going on. A student that had never been to the fair shared with us:
“I have never tabled before, and it was a good experience! I didn’t expect so many people to be interested in helping out.”
Going forward, RenderQ is thinking of plans to make a Collab-Fair in Savannah inspired by the Atlanta-based event. We hope to create this fair and bring it on-ground at Monty so students can walk around and talk to people in the projects. We can even make the event cross-campus to connect students who might not ever meet other SCAD students that are at either campus.
We would like to thank Professor Ashwin Inamdar for allowing the RenderQ team in the Collab-Fair to host a table and interview the other student projects. We had an amazing time participating and learning about all of the student projects currently in progress! We look forward to participating again next quarter!