Reply To: COLLAB2022 | HQ | Pre-Production

[Kent Trammell]

What about Membership?

Both Core and Shell teams are reserved for subscribing Citizen members.

I’m sure some of you reading this just checked out, and that’s OK. In fact, that’s by design. If you didn’t check out, you’re the type we’re interested in: The Invested.

Here’s a few key reasons we’re requiring membership for both participation levels:

Members are invested in their Blender journey.

By nature of paid subscription, members inherently take their journey far more seriously, on average, than free users. They follow and apply our courses better, they practice more, they help answer more peer questions, etc.

Passion Projects are extremely prone to failure.

Countless 3D projects, games, and short films are day-dreamed into the initial steps of existence. I’ve been a part of many myself. And yet so few of them persevere to completion. It’s way too common for the burden of work and erosion of time to snuff out motivation and devolve passion projects into memory.

This will not be the case for Collabs. We are committed to seeing them succeed to their highest potential. Such success depends on an invested community.

Collabs are a Citizen thing.

Collabs are and always have been part of CGC Membership DNA. The collab format was conceived by members and they’ve been fostered by members ever since. Simply put: Collabs are a Citizen thing.

This project doesn’t need more participation.

We designed the scope of this project to only need 30 contributors. My entire motivation to introduce Shell Team is to give more people – more invested people – an opportunity to join.

Trust me, I love that Collab2021’s credit sequence was 8 minutes long! And the more people that celebrate as a team on premiere day – that’s amazing. The more the merrier!

Yet if no one wants to participate on Shell Team, that’s OK, the project isn’t threatened.

Free participation is a liability.

Paying members rarely jeopardize their community on purpose. However a free participant outside the investment of this community could wreak havoc on a Collab production from the inside. Membership does not guarantee this won’t happen but it tends to discourage trolls.