Thoughts on jamming
I am a big Game Jam Doer - in the early 2010s I believe I once did eight in one year. I've fallen off pretty hard over the last few years - game jams eat a weekend, and I'm gaining more and more weekend responsibilities that make it hard for me to spend three days in a row desperately making a game.
However, I've also taken up new types of "jam"-style creative activities. I have just barely started participating in "beat battle" style music activities, where people make a one-minute song in two hours. And this past weekend, I took inspiration from that to run an "AMV Jam" where I and some others spent two hours making an anime music video two minutes long or less.
Boy, I'm not very good at speed editing!! Making a music video in two hours makes me feel the same way I used to feel when I started doing game jams for the first time. I had to cut my ambitions in half... I started off with a two minute edit of Psycho Killer by the talking heads that I'd prepared in advance. After 1.5 hours of editing, I was forced to cut my song in half and just make a 58-second AMV, cutting off halfway through a David Byrne wail.
The cool thing about speed-creation jamming type stuff is that they teach you completely different skills than you usually build while performing your craft normally. Game jams do not teach you how to make a game in a weekend... they teach you how to scope down. The core game jam skill is learning how to plan a project which can be cut in half, or cut down even harder. It's about learning how to structure your work so that you have something functional as soon as possible and can test it before the last hour of the activity.
These are really, really important skills for professional game development, and the reason I'm not terrified by scope cuts in my day job is probably because jams have taught me that scope cuts are a morally-neutral inevitability, not a crime against my art. Jams have also taught me some really practical scope-cutting techniques for narrative design, particularly with respect to modular and procgen systems.
I assume that I'm learning similarly specific skills from making music and videos in two-hour crunches. If I were composing music without a time limit, I'm sure I would be focusing on different kinds of growth.
As far as I can tell, the main thing I'm learning from these shorter editing experiences is that I need to get better at choosing a core idea and sticking very firmly to it during my jam time. If I try to just make something that looks or sounds good, I won't be able to do that in two hours. Instead, I need to learn how to communicate a thought or idea with music and sound, and commit to that communication above all else. It's fine if my thing is half-finished or ugly or I have to cut it in half before turning it in... what really just matters is that it has something identifiable to say.
It's also a plus if the thing you're saying is funny.
I've only run one AMV jam! I think the next time I do this, I'm going to make some changes. Participants wanted 3 hours instead of 2, and wanted us to provide a more rigorous and shorter cut-down of the anime footage for them to work with. The beat battle I've done are all based on editing a sample... I guess in an AMV jam, a pre-edited "highlights reel" of the anime is also like a sample. The one we provided this time around was too long.
Anyway, I highly recommend doing this kind of stuff. If everyone has low expectations and enjoys the material they're assigned to work with, it's a delightful time. You will probably not learn how to actually do a good job at composition or editing, but you will learn some esoteric creative approach strategies that may serve you well in other times and places.
I can imagine that it might also be funny to have a competition where your friends make a fan cam style music video of a character from a movie or some other unexpected media source... maybe someday I should run a fan cam jam and just hand everyone a copy of Alien or something. Lots of possibilities in that space...