Hey all I found this being spread around facebook and I wanted to share it through my blog as well. All I ask is that you copy this onto your own blog sites as well.
Please consider doing this!
Hey facebook, I had an idea…..All those kids in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds at the Batman massacre could use a visit from their hero. I propose we (as in all of facebook) should make enough noise asking Christian Bale to visit these kids in the hospital dressed in the real Batman outfit. They need to know Heroes can be real too, not just the bad guys.
Not asking anything fancy from you, if you read this, share it on your wall. If you wanna go the extra mile, post it in other sites as well. Show the kids there really are heroes.
Dear Christian Bale, Please visit the injured children from the movie massacre as Batman, you have the power to be a Hero right now, not a movie Hero, a real life flesh and blood one.
The remix assignment this week was to use the remix generator to produce a remix card paired with another assignment from the ds106 assignment repository. The task was to then interpret this as a new assignment and do it. We were instructed to look at the examples that were done for the original assignment, and use media from one of these as the starting point.
The remix generator made for some interesting browsing this week. I’ve randomly been flipping through to computer-generated combinations, looking for something that (a) had examples, (b) was feasible with my limited skills, and (c) was interesting. After a few start and stop trial and errors, I got Remixed Assignments 454 (5 stars), which basically meant I needed to take a time-lapse pic from another ds106er and “Dr. Seuss” it. There was only one example available to use: kimchipizza’s soccer composite.
I then conducted a quick Google search to find a quote or saying from a Dr. Seuss book that included anything about a ball. And I found this one:
“Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all.”
Since this quote is from “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”, I did Google image search for the book, looking for an appropriate image to incorporate into the image, settling on this one of the main character, from Dr. Seuss Wiki:
After accumulating the pieces and parts that I needed, I used Aviary Image Editor to create my remix.
After watching all four Everything is a Remix videos created by Kirby Ferguson and his blog, I think one of the most profound things he said that really drove home the reasons for remixes was “Nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. And after that, things can get interesting.”
Mr. Ferguson articulates the basic elements of creativity as: copy, transform, and combine. And when you think about it learning takes the same cycle. Singers learn their voice capabilities and practice on already recorded songs. Musicians learn their instruments by playing their favorite tunes or songs over and over. Artists likely start by imitating famous paintings or the concepts. Actors learn to act by watch movies and reenacting the scenes. Once an individual has been copying awhile, they start to put their own “twist” on the works, varying them slightly to add their individual flavor or personality into the mix, transforming the subject piece.
Watching, listening, doing…it’s how humans learn new things. Add in our desire for free will, to make our mark, add our own personal flare…and there you have it, we are all remixing all the time. Consciously or subconsciously, over time we have noted things we liked, or didn’t like, things we might have done differently and use these ideas later. Remix is a creative way to learn and grow and experiment with our own individuality…and stretch our imaginations!
I have to wonder, if now, in the 21st century, there is such a thing as “original”? It seems to up for debate nearly constantly. Amateurs and professionals alike are constantly recycling ideas, changing them, morphing them into different, new products of art. But introduce copyright into the conversation and things get really dicey. Should it be a copyright violation to remix? In my opinion: No! Unless of course you are misrepresenting a work as yours. Give credit where credit is due. Making a profit, monetary or otherwise, off someone’s else hard work is wrong, but recycling, reusing, and reinterpreting ideas and concepts is a great way to show how much you like the original (or not).
One of the best remixes I reviewed this week was this one:
The Shining was a damned scary movie the first time I watched it. I’ve seen it many times since and enjoy it. This remix of scenes from the movie completely changes the premise of the plot, leading the viewer of THIS video remix to believe that this is a sentimental story of love, a drama…instead of a horror flick. The scenes weren’t altered. They were just cut and arranged differently to create a different mood. Very creative!
30 Classic Music Albums Recreated With Lego was really fascinating to scroll through. I wish my Lego-maniac kids had so expertly imitated something like this. No, it’s not original design, but very creative interpretations of famous album art. Remember when album cover art was truly an art? I used to love to flip through my parents album collection simply admiring the different types of cover art. I have a few of my favorites framed and hanging in my home now. I don’t think the Lego creations of these art covers are rip offs…more of a different form of art. I bet the original artists or designers couldn’t do it with Legos!
I’m surprised that “Weird Al” Yankovic has not entered into he remixing conversations of ds106. This guy has made a very lucrative career remixing songs and videos! He uses satire and comedy to reinterpret other musicians work and poke fun at the musician themselves in some cases, like in this hilarious video remix of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way!
And here’s Lady Gaga’s original video of this song, if you’re interested.
In ds106, much of what we do is remixing for the purposes of learning through experimentation and sharing of products and processes. Many find trying to recreate or improve upon any already existing piece of work a convenient and intensely educational. I know I do! I have learned so much through trial and error and feedback during the ds106 process. It was a lot more fun than sitting through a lecture being talked AT about all the concepts we’ve studied here.
I want to conclude by saying that imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery. This is one of the reason my most original works and products for ds106 and this blog are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0. Go ahead…remix my work. I’m cool with that…as long as you give credit to me for what is mine and don’t make money off me (without sharing anyway)!
Remixes are everywhere and they are unavoidable. Some remixes are easier to do and others are simple. While watching some of these videos, I got a understanding how HOW TO do some things I never thought of before. It is even more interesting to know just how creative some people are to come up with remix ideas. Several of these remixes take pure creative minds to think of and technological skills to make it happen. I do think that the people who remix an original art should have some copyright to it. Being that they recreated something with their own idea, they should have some share.
The video clips that were listen on Magic McGuffin website were very intriguing. I wanted to blog about all of them, but I chose to do my favorite 3.
The first point that I liked about the remix world is how you can put two different things together and make one. The video I watched was the Buffy vs. Edward. They are two different movies, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Twilight but they have the same concept. Vampires. Now I personally never seen the two movies, but I know of them. It was magnificent to watch how the two movies were mixed into one..
The second thing I liked about the remix world was how you can take a movie, take the dialogue from the movie, and make it into something else. I liked how this particular mix took the Star Wars movie and the song “Call me maybe” by Carly Rae Jepson and basically made a music video. The took clips from Star Wars of the actors/actress saying the words from “Call me maybe” and put it all together into one video. It seems so simple, but I know there had to be some difficulties find the words and chopping them up.
The third thing I liked about the remix world was how you can take current events/news stories and add them into songs to make a remix of the song. I liked how they did “Can’t Tase This” remix of ”Can’t touch this” by M.C Hammer It honestly made me laugh because they took a kind of sad news event and make it into a funny song. This type of remix seemed easy to do and it is actually something that I would like to try myself.
The goal of this mashup remix assignment is to create a ringtone for a phone in another language. I used Garage Band for the editing process.
First, I went on to www.freesound.org and found the sounds of a phone ringing. Second I looked up on google translate how to say “Pick up your phone” and “Are you there” in Norwegian. I used Norwegian as my language because once when I was very young I went to Norway for a few weeks. Right when I saw this assignment I thought, this would be a fun language to try it out in and I never learned any words so I could just start now!
The third part was recording my self on Sound Cloud saying the phrases “Plukk opp telefonen” which means pick up your phone and “Er du det” which means are you there. I uploaded these sounds to my Itunes and from there into Garage Band.
Garage band offers free sounds and music segments to incorporate into your work. I chose “Carousel” which was under the topic of “World Music Sounds” I layered me speaking, carousel, and the ringing of phone all on top of each other.
This is a remix because it has three different layers of sound complied into one finished sound. All of the layers were legally obtained to create a ringtone in Norwegian.
Sadly, I don’t really watch too many movies, but the few movies I watch are mainly animated. Why? I am a big kid at heart and animated movies has a way of keeping me young. Well, that is my story and I’m sticking to it. The assignment that allowed me to mash up movies, was one that I over-looked first. Then as I was going through the other assignments I got an idea of how to do this assignment.
My favorite movie of all time is TAKEN. Which is about a CIA agents who’s daughter gets kidnapped and he has to look for her. My favorite childhood movies were FINDING NEMO, which is about a fish that is separated from his father, and he father has to find him; and DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR, which is about a boy that basically looks for his car the whole movie. My favorite animated movie on from Disney is CARS. Which is about a race car that gets lost and finds himself in a deserted town. The car’s name is Lightning McQueen and all he wants is to get back to the big race.
What I did was take the 4 movies and put them into one poster. Which is below..
I created a whole new movie, called “Taken 2: Finding Lightning McQueen” [Taken 2] is from the movie TAKEN, [Finding] is from FINDING NEMO, and [Lightning McQueen] is from CARS. The poster includes a picture of [Dory] from the movie FINDING NEMO and a quote. The quote [Dude, Where's my Car] is from the movie DUDE WHERE’S MY CAR. In all the 4 movies are combined into a poster for a new movie
Anyone has potential to be creative and express themselves through different mediums. It can vary between taking pictures, making music, editing, painting, singing, dancing, and the list just goes on and on.
According to Austin Kleon who wrote “Steal like an Artist” creativity can be for anyone as long as you are in the right environment with the right influences. He believes that everyone is a mashup of whatever is let into an individuals life. If your open to ideas and creative thoughts then they can influence your creative thoughts and works too. I agree with Kleon with this idea of “Steal like an Artist” creativity should be shared with everyone and not limited to the individual who thought of it first. Ideas are always a build off of another one and this is how people grow as individuals in a creative mind st.
Girl Talk, a DJ who is notorious for taking songs and remixing them together makes great mashups and uses his creativity for his followers benefits. The music that Girl Talk mashes together is a controversy that it could be illegal and copyright violations. If this was the case, there would be tons of criminals in this world by downloading music or making their own mashups. I believe as long as credit is given to the original song or work of art then it should be shared for others to use. In all likely hood their work was probably built off of someone else in the past too.
The explanation of copyright through Disney characters was hilarious. Disney is an intimidating company when it comes to copyright violations and has the power/money to take just about anyone down who does something illegal with their work.
There are two sides to this argument. The first one is what I have stated above but the other side is for the artists who have to make a living off of their work. If people are using their music, pictures, and other forms of art then they cannot make money and all of their hard work has not been repayed. I believe people should be more informed about sites like Creative Commons, freesound.org and other websites that allow for the use of sharing creativity throughout the world. If more people knew about it then there would be more to go around. However I don’t think that all pieces of creativity should be shared because people do need to make money and want to see results for their hard work.
Examples of Remixes
“Mary Poppins” flipped to a horror film. Music really does reflect the mood of a movie or segment of video. It is remixed from being about a wonderful and perfect nanny to being a horrifying crazy nanny from hell. This was remixed by Chris Rule, and he did a great job of using the Mary Poppin’s trailer to come off as a completely different film.
Buffy vs. Edward -Twilight Remix
If you read my earlier blog post about mashing together all the Twilight trailers then it would be obvious that I couldn’t resist the urge to watch this remix. Jonathan Mclntosh took clippings from Twilight to portray Edward as a complete creep and stalker. I will admit he did a fantastic job it was very funny to watch! Instead of the typical girl falling for the vampire allure, Buffy who is in fact a vampire slayer is completely creeped out by him. The story flows together for the whole segment. I did notice at minute 5:24 a scene from Harry Potter is taken when Robert Pattinson (Edward) is killed by Lord Voldermort. Which was interesting to throw in there but it did add the effect of Edward getting killed by Buffy. By remixing scenes together like this, you can totally change the persona of a character in just a matter of minutes.
Star Wars and Call Me Maybe
Call Me Maybe is one of the most popular songs currently, that is being remixed or mocked. This is the most creative one I have seen so far. Like the Disney explantation of Copyright, the dialogue of Star Wars characters is used to talk out the lyrics of Call Me Maybe. Layered on top is the instrumentals to the song. Its a remix because it is taking too different outlets and merged together to create one.
Mashup Assignment 135 (4 stars)called for making a movie trailer by taking a trilogy, or any series of movies, and combining scenes from all the trailers to make one trailer. This was an easier assignment, and considering all my problem with video editing, I figured I could probably handle this one with a minimum of frustration. For the subject of this assignment, I decided to make a trailer montage for one of my favorite movie series, Lethal Weapon.
Turns out I was right. After downloading the four individual HD trailers for the Lethal Weapon movies from YouTube, I imported them all into VideoPad to splice them together. Starting with the first movie, Lethal Weapon, I cropped off extra material at the end of the trailer that I didn’t want to keep. Then I added the next trailer for Lethal Weapon 2, to the video track immediately after the first one. Again, some trimming to make the resulting “uni-trailer” a little shorter and transitions less obvious, I added the third and fourth videos trailers for Lethal Weapon 3 and Lethal Weapon 4. Admittedly, the transitions between segments are not as smooth and more obvious as would have liked, but the damned video editing software is making my crazy, so I did my best and settled for that.
And if you haven’t seen the Lethal Weapon movies yet…I hope this teases you into it! Working on this task has reignited my love for these movies so I see a movie marathon coming in the near future!
The goal of the “Consumer Mashup” was to take a store that you shop at often and incorporate the good you usually buy with the logo of that store. I am feign for smoothies and always go to Tropical Smoothie or Robecks. Lately however I have been choosing Tropical Smoothie. Not entirely sure why…maybe because of price or maybe because I feel cool drinking a “tropical” smoothie.
Regardless I decided to make my own logo for Tropical Smoothie instead of using theirs. I replaced the “i” in tropical and smoothie with an image of a smoothie drink from this establishment. Then I used PowerPoint to get a tropical/island themed background. I made the entire logo on PowerPoint. I made each letter a different color to make it vibrant and fun.
After I was finished I took a screen shot of the logo and uploaded it to FLICKR.
First off I would like to state, yes I am one of those people that actually enjoy watching the Twilight Saga… judge all you want.
For those of you who aren’t informed about the wonders of the Twilight Saga, there are four books. The last book (like Harry Potter) is made into two different movies, therefore there are five movies. I took a clipping from each movie trailer and edited them together. I used www.keepvid.com to download the YouTube trailers. I decided I wanted to make a story of the Twilight Saga through the trailer, but still leave some mystery at the end. For those of who are diehard fans like me there is no mystery. However for those of you who are interested in Twilight and learning about its ”fantasticness” this trailer will be a great introduction into the saga!
I used iMovie to merge together all the trailers. Since the trailers are already edited with music, all I had to do was put pieces together and hoped it would make sense. I faded in and out with sound to make a better transition.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
