I have tried to post regularly to this blog over the course of the semester, and these are what I consider to be my 5 best.
Post #1 – The Problem with Brandalism – Brandalisim is an interesting concept, while I feel the sentiment behind it is warranted I have serious doubts about its ability to create awareness of issues amongst the general public. I have included this in my top 5 because I think its an important discussion to have, we need to be aware of the issues raised through the brandalism movement, but also need to consider the mode in which we raise them.
Post #2 – What Do I Think About Copyright? – Discussing copyright has been a significant part of the conversation we have had this semester, I have included this as one of my best blog posts because it is important that I explore my own personal feelings towards the laws and ethics involved in REMIX culture.
Post #3 – What Makes Paul’s Boutique So Important? – This was the most fun blog post for me to write, I love the Beastie Boys and it was exciting to explore and research one of their albums. The Beastie Boys are important figures in the history of REMIX and ‘Paul’s Boutique’ is not only a landmark hip hop album, but has gone on to influence the way music is produced. This is why I have included this post in my top 5.
Post #4 – Messing Around with Sound & More Messing Around with Sound – I’ve included these posts because this was an important moment for me. Before we started playing around with sounds in the tutorials I was really unsure of how I was going to go creating stuff. I got a lot of confidence out of these weeks and was proud of what I made. Even though technically these are 2 separate posts I have included them as one because the content is linked.
Post #5 – Welcome to the World of REMIX – It was hard to decide which blog post to include as #5 on my list of best blogs, it was either going to be this one or my one about Quentin Tarantino’s films. While I like both of them, I think this one deserves to be on this list as it was a reflection on what I thought REMIX was and is an interesting contrast to the more informed posts I did later in the semester. There is also something satisfying about finishing my last post with the content of my first one (REMIX!)
Quentin Tarantino is one of the world’s most prominent remix artists. He was doing it before it was cool, before the internet got a hold of it, and before anyone really knew what it was. The amount of references, homages and straight up reconstructions that he has peppered throughout his filmography is staggering. Take a look at this video that shows some of the references made in the ‘Kill Bill’ saga alone, and I dare say a few have still slipped under the radar. Tarantino’s knowledge of film is encyclopaedic, especially when it comes to the thriller, action, martial art, rape/revenge, exploitation, western, horror (the list just goes on!) films that have inspired most of his body of work.
Tarantino makes no apologies for using other films to inspire the aesthetic and narrative of his own, and why should he? Part of the fun of watching a Tarantino movie is picking up all the references (or more realistically going to IMDB after watching the movie and reading about all the references). I love the way that Tarantino incorporates film history and his passion for cinema into his own movies, but this point of view isn’t shared by everyone. Tarantino’s films connect with large audiences and score big at the box office, however the director continues to polarize audiences and critics as a result of his remix style of filmmaking. Some find his work unoriginal and even accuse him of ‘stealing’ from other filmmakers, I think this point of view is pretty harsh and these guys should all try to lighten up a bit.
Tarantino is doing what filmmakers (and artists) have always done, he takes inspiration from something that already exits, reimagines it and makes it his own. The only difference between QT and a million other filmmakers, authors, musicians, painters etc etc is that he doesn’t try to hide the fact that other works of art have made an impression on, and influenced him. I think this is something that he deserves praise for. The outrage that is sometimes directed towards him from critics and overzealous fan boys is unwarranted and unnecessary.
It’s just over 2 months before Tarantino’s 8th film (and his 2nd Western) is released in cinema’s, and I can’t wait to see which films he references, reappropriates and remixes into it, bring on ‘The Hateful 8’!
Every aspect of this assignment was a struggle. A constant battle with frustration and dissatisfaction that had me chugging energy drinks, tearing my hair out, punching the air and screaming into pillows. I am being dramatic of course, I never actually screamed into a pillow, but I considered it more than once. In fact, creating this work wasn’t a horrible experience, but I did doubt whether or not it would work the way I wanted it to. I cast doubt aside and soldiered on and remained on track by constantly reassuring myself that everything would be ok and that all lose ends would tie up neatly in the end. Luckily, I was right. This assignment was incredibly frustrating and ultimately extremely satisfying. Let’s start at the beginning.
The Beginning – The Idea
For this assignment, I knew from the get go that I wanted to use clips from the NPR radio show ‘This American Life’. I didn’t know how, or why, but for some reason from the beginning of the semester I knew that I would. As the idea began to take form I decided that I would edit short clips from various episodes, layer them on top of remixed sounds and use these to create a soundtrack for a short video. I wanted to use all of the skills that I have acquired during the semester to create unique sounds and visuals.
The work would focus on storytelling, it wouldn’t necessarily be a formal narrative, but it would explore how we tell stories and also, how we interpret them. The work wouldn’t offer any answers, but if the person viewing/listening to it is looking for a story, it is likely that they will find one. Of course copyright would be an issue, but I dealt with this in a few different ways (which I will detail shortly).
The Bit After the Beginning – The Start of the Process
I chose 22 (I used 18 it the finished product) episodes of ‘This American Life’, each episode was chosen completely at random. (You can download any episode from the show’s history at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives)
I selected one short clip from each episode (between 4 & 15 seconds) and then imported the tracks to audacity, and removed the section I wanted to keep. I kept each of the clips in one Audacity file and assigned them a number.
I transcribed each of the clips into a note book, and also noted which episodes I had edited.
I cut out each of the lines and played around with them until I was happy with how they were arranged. Then I noted down the order so I could rearrange the clips in a new Audacity file.
The volume levels were different on a lot of the tracks because they were recordings of people talking, some people’s voices were loud and others were really soft, I did the best I could to correct this by using the ‘amplify’ feature. This took a bit of playing around, but wasn’t too difficult to sort out. The process so far had been relatively stress free! I kept the overall track volume peak at a gain level of -3.0db.
The Bit in the Middle – Adding Some Music
I wanted to have some music accompanying the spoken word element of the work so I chose 2 songs to remix:
Default – Django Django – This was used for the main body of the music. I took a few seconds from the intro to the song and used the ‘paulstretch’ feature to slow it down and warp the sound. I found this to be a really simple way to create something that sounds completely different from the source material. It also created the haunting, but not heavy sound I was looking for. It took absolutely ages to find a song that created the sound I wanted and I spent hours testing out different tracks before I found this one. It was frustrating but I didn’t want to settle for something that didn’t quite fit.
All This Time – The Heartless Bastards – The drum beat that I used was lifted from the beginning of this song, it is the first couple of beats set on repeat.
I saved this and combined it with the spoken word clips and my audio file was complete. I tested to see if Shazam could recognise the songs and it passed with flying colours.
This is where things started to get frustrating. I knew that I wanted to use lots of clips from television shows, chopped up and rearranged, manipulated with lots of short, rapid fire edits…but my computer had other ideas. First of all the version of Premiere Pro that I was using was not what I was used to (in my already limited experience) so I was basically relearning the program. My laptop was not dealing well with iMovie either, it was taking ages to load video’s and crashing (literally) every ten minutes. I was going nuts. I had wanted to use a large number of shows (100+) to make up the video, but I had to significantly lower that number (6) because my computer just couldn’t handle it. I made lots of edits to make up for not being able to use as many clips as I had hoped and exported the file from iMovie and converted it to an mp4 so it could be imported to Premier Pro.
When I tested the video I realised that the preview in iMovie was not what had been exported, for some reason it had changed every single clip and what I had was completely different to what I had expected to get. This was a pillow screaming moment, well, it almost was. I took a deep breath and just decided to run with what I had and imported the clip to Premiere Pro.
Once the clip was in Premiere Pro I tested a whole bunch of effects to try and achieve the look I wanted. We have talked about the Beastie Boys a few times during the semester and I wanted to do a subtle reference to them with the visual style of my video. I wanted the look of the video to resemble the album cover for their final album ‘Hot Sauce Committee Part Two’
I decided to use the ‘mosaic’ effect to make the video very blocky and I also played around with the colour until it was very bright and vibrant. I used a few other effects but to be honest I was about 2 V’s down and it was close to 5:00am, and at this point I had become a bit of a jiterry mess, so I can’t actually remember what they were. There was a lot of dial twiddling and trial and error though, but I was very happy with the end result.
I exported the file from Premiere Pro, imported it back into iMovie and combined it with the audio track.
Copyright – Does it Stand Up?
Let’s break this into 3 categories:
1. Video – The finished video looks nothing like its source material. It has been changed and manipulated enough that it is completely unrecognisable and would have no problem passing copyright scrutiny.
2. Music – Again I believe this has been changed enough to be considered its own work. It is not recognised by programs like Shazam and does not have any recognisable features. The drum beat I used is so generic that it would have no problem passing copyright scrutiny.
3. Spoken Word Clips – This is where I knew I would have trouble. The clips taken from ‘This American Life’ are short, but are completely recognisable to the copyright owners and people familiar with these particular episodes. I researched whether use of the clips would be considered fair use, but this was a very deep and confusing rabbit hole to venture into. What I was using was such a small percentage of the original work, I wasn’t going to profit from it, the clips I was using were not central to the original work, it didn’t effect the market potential of the source material *deep breath*, but I still wasn’t comfortable. I kept thinking of that moment in ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’ where that lady cringes when she hears how GirlTalk pieces together his songs. Copyright is such a huge, HUGE concept, I mean people go to law school to learn about this specifically, so how could I hope to wrap my head around it? Then I thought, why don’t I just ask? So I did. I got in touch with the producers of ‘This American Life’ and asked them if I could use the clips, and to my huge relief they said “yes”. Although these clips are recognisable I have been given authority to use them by the copyright holder, so I can live without the fear of an impending lawsuit.
The Final Work – New & Troubling Questions
I’m really proud with how this video worked out. I wanted to explore the idea of storytelling by remixing and reusing popular modes of storytelling such as radio, television and music. I think everyone who views this work will walk away with something different and will project a story of their own on to it. Like I said at the beginning, this work was never meant to provide answers, only encourage thought.
The Beastie Boys debut album ‘Licensed to Ill’ was faithful to the boom bap style of hip hop that dominated the New York scene during the 80’s and 90’s, it was a monster seller, spending 73 weeks on the Billboard 200 and selling nine million copies in the U.S.‘(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)’ was an incredibly popular single, even if it was a joke that went over peoples heads and was ultimately embraced as an anthem by those that it attempted to lampoon. 3 years later the Beastie Boys second LP ‘Paul’s Boutique’ received a lukewarm response from both fans and critics who didn’t know what to make of the groups new frantic, face paced and sample heavy sound. Over the proceeding 2 decades the albums popularity increased and today it is considered a hip-hop masterpiece and one of the best album of the 1980’s. But why? What changed in the years that followed the albums release that transformed it from a creative misfire to a work of genius? It basically boils down to two factors:
No one had ever made an album like this before.
No one could ever make an album like this again.
It would take years for the record industry to catch up to what the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers were doing, and by the time other artists decided they wanted a piece of the pie it was too late. Increased awareness of copyright meant that it was next to impossible for artist to cut, chop, change and remix other works to the extent found on ‘Paul’s Boutique’. It has been estimated that if you were to legally purchase the rights to all the music (it is still unclear exactly how many songs are sampled throughout the LP, some reports suggests upwards of 450, http://www.paulsboutique.info/ have been working since 1993 to try and uncover them all) featured on ‘Paul’s Boutique’ it would cost well into the double digit millions. Not bad when you consider that Capitol Records only had to pay about $250,000 for sampling rights. 2 years after the release of ‘Paul’s Boutique’ regular collaborator and friend of the Beastie’s, Biz Markie was successfully sued by Gilbert O’Sullivan and Warner Music after sampling ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’ on his album ‘I Need a Haircut’, this lawsuit would be the final nail in the coffin for affordable sampling and would ensure ‘Paul’s Boutique’ remained a unique hip-hop album.
Evolving copyright laws and increasingly aware corporate types would ensure that no artist could ever again get away with creating an album as audacious as ‘Paul’s Boutique’, but its influence spread far and wide, eventually transcending the hip-hop genre and penetrating the folk, pop and dance scenes. Beck scrapped his entire ‘Odelay’ album after hearing the Beastie Boys opus, immediately shacking up with the Dust Brothers and starting the albums production from scratch. The concept of sampling would only get more popular as rap outgrew the boom bap sound, and although this was likely an organic progression that would have happened with or without the Beastie Boys album, its undeniable that the sheer voracity of ‘Paul’s Boutique’ fast tracked the process.
This is a tough question. I want to say that I hate copyright and it’s all bullshit and everything should be free for everyone, but it just doesn’t feel right. My gut tells me that if you create something, you own it and have the right to make money off of it. This includes the right to protect it from others who want to use it to make money for themselves. I understand that when something is remixed properly it becomes an original work and transcends the source material, but if someone remixes something and makes money off of it because it reminds someone of something else, I call bullshit. However, If you’re not doing it for financial gain go for it! I fail to see how creating fan video’s, mash ups and remixes of songs and films is detrimental to the copyright holders. Is this not the most potent form of advertising available? Someone makes a video, poster, song, whatever, to pay homage to something that they love, they throw it online and then the world gets to share in it…what could be more convincing? I think corporations and individuals preventing people from sharing their passion for media is ridiculous and a supreme waste of everybody’s time.
In Australia copyright on published film and music lasts for the author’s life plus 70 years, which seems excessive. A product patent only lasts for 20 years, comparably this makes no sense at all. How come you can invent something physical, which may take a lifetime to complete and 2 decades later its available to anyone, but you write a 3 minute song on Garageband and it’s almost 2 centuries before it enters the public domain? Outrageous. I think people have the right to make art out of whatever they like, which is an extremely volatile statement because, you know, what is art? Who knows and this is definitely not something I am prepared or willing to go into, but I guess what I’m saying is, if you have a genuine drive to create something new from something that already exists then you should be given the opportunity to. At the very least you should have the option of doing it without having to worry about your bedroom door being kicked down, your hard drives being seized and being water-boarded until you admit that you’re the one that posted that Beyonce/Austin Powers mash-up to YouTube.
People work hard to create movies, television, music, books, comics etc and they have a right for that to be their source of income. If the public likes it they should pay to consume it, but I also believe they should have the right to manipulate, change, tweak and distort it. Much of this post may be contradictory and I think that is unavoidable. Copyright laws and ethics are incredibly intricate and evolve at an unstoppable pace, I don’t think its possible for me to take a strong and informed stance yet, let alone articulate it in a 500 word blog post. It is likely something I will need to put a lot more thought into, but I don’t think it’s an issue that will be resolved anytime soon, so I probably have plenty of time to make up my mind.
Advertising is everywhere, literally everywhere. I mean if you look around you right now chances are you will be able to find some sort of advertising, whether it be the branding on your computer screen, a logo on an item of clothing or a pop up ad forcing itself onto your browser, the stuff is all over the place. Dare to venture outside and it becomes even more unavoidable, the outdoors has long been a battleground on which corporations fight for territory in which to sell their junk. Advertising is in our face 24/7 and the sad fact is that no one really even notices anymore, we’re kind of born into it and it is as natural to us as clouds or sunshine. Well, this might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I stand by the idea that advertising has been assimilated into our daily experience, not necessarily by choice but rather a lack of choice in the matter.
For some people this is simply the way we live now, and for others it is an unacceptable compromise. For those that fall in the latter, brandalism is a way to fight back against corporations, advertising and the ever increasing importance placed on consumption. Or is it? The answer to this question, is a definite…maybe.
The problem with this is that the public is stupid. Maybe stupid is a bit harsh, it’s not that people are stupid, they’re just not paying attention (for the record I’m often oblivious to what is going on around me and in no way consider myself to be above the distracted masses). This is a direct result of the years of advertising that we have had shoved in our faces whenever we’ve caught a bus, watched TV, read a magazine or jumped online. When we see works of brandalism we’re not always able to differentiate them from the advertisements they are trying to subvert, which makes the whole endeavour pretty pointless. If you are trying to make a comment on how Nike’s business model is cutthroat and that our desire for cool sneakers results in poor living conditions half way across the world and deaths more locally, but you just end up making people think about getting a new pair of sneakers, your point has been lost and it’s probably time to think of a new approach.
Also, the idea that the best way to combat corporations invading public space is by replacing advertisements with your own (insert quotation marks)less offensive and more important(insert quotations marks) work is pretty conceited. People might not want to be assaulted by advertising, but they may feel just as strongly about having art thrust upon them.
Brandalism can be powerful, but it can also miss the mark entirely. It makes for some aesthetically pleasing and entertaining artwork, but I’m not convinced that it can be used as an agent for meaningful change.
The challenge for our third assessment was to manipulate a video to the point in which it became something completely new and original. The final product was to be unrecognisable when compared to the source material, it didn’t have to be long, it didn’t have to make sense and it didn’t have to be pretty, it simply had to be original. At first, this sounded amazing. A challenge with no rules and no dictated outcome should be easy, right? The answer to that question is a resounding…kind of. Getting the ball rolling on this challenge was much harder than I anticipated as I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to do it. After a few false starts and what seemed like hours staring at a blank screen I decided that the only way to get anywhere would be to start and just keep going, to throw any preconceived ideas of how this project should be done to the side and, as Shia Labeouf would say, JUST. DO. IT! So, I just did it.
Step one was find a clip on YouTube. I put little to no thought into the clip I chose, in fact I can’t even remember how I stumbled onto it or why I chose it, it didn’t really matter because ultimately my finished product would look nothing like it. The clip I chose was a scene from the classic comedy film ‘Problem Child 2’, the scene where Junior tampers with the amusement park ride and everyone spews up on everyone else.
I downloaded the clip from YouTube using http://www.keepvid.com, imported it to iMovie and cut out a small section of it to work with. I decided early on that I would try to use iMovie for as much of the project as possible, not because I’m skilled with the program, to be honest I don’t even really like it, but it’s the only program I have easy access to so I decided to try and use it as much as possible. I took my short clip and made a bunch of really short cuts, then I took the deconstructed clip and changed up the order. This gave the clip a really good ‘glitchy’ effect, which made me feel like I was on the right track. Once I was happy with the effect from the cuts I sped the clip up, then sped it up some more, then just kept speeding it up.
After this I just started drowning the clip in effects in an effort to warp the image…this didn’t really work. I worked out pretty quickly that iMovie is pretty limited when it comes to things like this, I could throw as many effects as I wanted at it but it was not going to change the look in the way that I wanted. By the time I was finished with iMovie I was left with something that looked different from the original clip, but still relied too much on the fact that it was a clip of a person. Basically, it was still too easy for the viewer to recognise the image on the screen.
This is where I realised that iMovie just wasn’t going to cut it, so I decided to import the video into Adobe Premiere Elements and see how much further I could push it. This was the right decision. There were so many more ways to manipulate the video available to me through this program, and suddenly I could make some significant changes to the way the video looked. I could twist, twirl, multiply, darken, lighten, resize, there was so much! Perhaps the biggest revelation was the ability to layer the video, I did this a few times and things started to get really warped, it was great. I finished off by multiplying the video multiple times until it was a collage of static, glitchy images. I decided to keep the original sound throughout the process because it sounded nothing like the original and I think it complimented the aesthetic of the clip really well. It sounded like a hard drive struggling, or maybe a robot dying, I don’t know, but it sounded good.
To finish up I exported the video from Adobe Premiere Elements and imported it back into iMovie where I cut it up and rearranged it again, just for good measure and a little last minute chaos.
I am pretty pleased with how this ended up, I feel as though I have created something original, and I definitely think that the finished product looked remarkably different to its source. This was a fun and satisfying assignment, once I was able to let go and just let the project develop organically.
conradchevorlet 