Stock footage has long been a VJ cliché, and remixes in and of themselves aren’t always meaningful. But in the right hands – just as in audio sampling – sampled content can take on new life. It might even find an unrecognizable form. And with publicly-funded documentaries, why not give the actual content back to the people who supported its creation, whether they render it as entirely new art or political material.
The US public broadcasting network, PBS, is doing just that with its Open Content series. For instance, I recently watched an episode of NOVA on the future of energy and automobile design. Raw footage shot for that documentary is available from PBS under a Creative Commons attribution / non-commercial license. (Read the rules.) You can see and download the clips here:
Friend of CDM Simulcast caught up with Australian video remixers Soda Jerk last year, to talk about their technically intense, epic, narrative remixes.
Soda_Jerk are two remix artists who create brand spanking new stories with their compositions. They work across several mediums but are probably best known for their entirely sample based audiovisual films that range from a couple of minutes to an hour long.
Their feature length and excellently named, “Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone” uses over 300 video and audio sources and stars Elvis Presley doing battle with the evil Moses and his Copyright Commandments fighting for the ancient art of the remix. The film also stars The Hulk, Monkey, Batman & Robin, Michael Jackson and The Ghostbusters.
I had the chance to hear these two inspiring artists speak at a recent exhibition and thought I’d hit them up for an interview…
So there’s an endless amount of content to sample and remix out there…what grabs your eye and ear?
We never know what’s going to grab us until we hear it or see it, so we just watch and listen to as much stuff as we can, as much of the time as we can. We do have a soft spot for aged or damaged footage though: decaying celluloid, warped video grain or digital glitches.
I really like your decision to use narrative in your remixes. Can you give us some insight into your workflow? Do you come up with a story first, or just sample everything that sounds and looks good and say “Cool, we can make a remixed feature film starring Moses, Elvis and Bill Murray.”
Our work is largely research driven, in the sense that we generally start with a concept that we are interested in and investigate it by consuming culture that’s related to the area (books, films, audio tracks etc). So with our most recent project “Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop” we were looking into this interesting field of theory called Afrofuturism and that lead us to dig through science fiction films and anything related to African-American sonic culture. It’s from these viewing sessions that usually an idea will emerge about what shape the project might take and then we’ll search in a more focused way for shots we could use. The way the narrative evolves is constantly shifting as we discover new footage that leads us in new directions. It involves a degree of openness to improvisation.
And what about technical workflow, I’m guessing there’s a fair bit of masking going on there?!
Yeah, our process is definitely large on the tedious and labor intensive aspects. Most projects involve weeks or months of doing nothing but just pushing masks around in After Effects.
The show will consist of live long-form collaborative remixing from Nelson (Netherlands), Quirk (Nueva York), and Valdez (Republic of Michigan) performed via the intertubes, and featuring a lot of new original stuff. This month’s theme: YOUR HEALTH!
As we continue to watch trailers reimagined as audiovisual remixes, Michael Forrest sends along a great Ableton Live remix of the trailer for Watchmen. What’s fun about Live in this case (and mirrors the way some folks work in Sony Vegas) is that it allows the remixer to think more fluidly about the line between audio and visuals. Watchmen aside, that opens up all kinds of audiovisual performance possibilities. I have very high hopes for Resolume Avenue 3, which takes this idea and applies it to a live performance / VJ context in ways Live and even Vegas can’t match. See previously:
Early builds of that app had been a bit unstable, as would be expected of software in early dev stages, but I just got a new beta build that’s looking significantly improved. That means you can expect a report soon.
Think A/V artists, visualists, and VJs can’t get work? Don’t tell that to superstar production team Addictive TV. They’ve been proving that you really don’t need a trailer for a film any more – just hire a VJ. It started when they created a web viral for the movie Take the Lead, and they went on to remix the Olympics
Now, the only problem is, I think you might actually need a VJ for the entire film to make a movie based on a computer game that isn’t crap. (Maybe Max Payne will be The One … even if it does come eons after anyone was playing Max Payne.) But for a couple of minutes, they can certainly make Max Payne cool; whether that sustains an entire cinematic evening I leave to Mark Wahlberg and the production team.
Even cooler, however: remixing Kristin Scott-Thomas and the music of Cole Porter (top). Cole, I’m sure, would approve, as would Kristin’s Greatest Fan, Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson. (I wish I could remember some lewd comment he made about Kristin, but then, this is a Family Site.)
Best of all? Watch them both at the same time. (Get someone to hold open your eyelids for a full-blown Clockwork Orange-style viewing party. Thanks, Brian Kane.)
It’s good stuff. And things are beginning to align – MGM is posting full films on YouTube, though not necessarily under a remix-friendly license (the usual copyright protections apply).
But could people soon be grabbing popcorn and really watching live cinema? Could VJs replace trailers with the same, generic booming sound effects and some dude saying meaningless lines like “Sometimes, the only way home is to start over again.”
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