Re-Mixer was a qualified success!
Last Sunday (Oct 23rd), we hosted the Free Culture Re-Mixer, which was a “mixer” for prospective students where we tried to teach them to “remix” their favorite TV shows to make their own music videos. (Yes, it’s a bad pun.) As you can see from the picture, we had an excellent turnout! I’m guessing about 30 people were there, maybe more. We began with a short talk about why the right to remix is important, and I played some examples of samples and mashups, including:
* How you remind me of someday - A Nickelback mashup which consists simply of playing two of their songs side by side, one out of the left speaker and one out of the right. Yes, they just wrote the same song twice and sold it back to you. It makes you wonder, does copyright really encourage creativity?
* A Stroke of Genius - A mashup of Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a
Bottle” with the Strokes’s “It’s Hard To Explain.” This one took some
creative thinking and good timing, but it’s still just a mashup.
* The Grey Video - A music video for the famous Grey Album, which mixes together Jay Z’s Black Album with the Beatles’s White Album. This undeniably took a great deal of talent, effort, and creativity to produce, but is still subject to the same legal difficulties that lesser remixes are subject to.
Once the talk was finished, we began trying to set up our remixing workstations, while we let the audience eat our pizza and drink our soda. Unfortunately, Rob Matthews ‘09 who actually does remixes for Fox, using their shows such as the Family Guy, was on a deadline and some of his computers were busy processing video for them. Rob uses Muvee autoProducer for Windows, which is proprietary software but is relatively inexpensive ($70?), and it makes it possible to produce a music video, with the music at least vaguely matching the video transitions, in a matter of minutes. Clearly, the power to play with and re-work the culture around us is coming within the reach of the average citizen: in this case, all you need is a laptop and some free time.
Many people left before we were able to get the computers working, but the ones who stayed were very impressed. Lesson learned: get the computers running beforehand. We’ll do a much better/faster job next time.