By simply re-dubbing video interviews with global economic, government and corporate leaders, the Yes Men create a more honest economic leader, foreshadowing the dissent amongst protesters who continue to Occupy the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos.

This year’s forum encourages leaders to “return to their core purpose of defining what the future should look like, aligning stakeholders around that vision…” , and the lip dubs give world leaders a chance to answer that call openly, admitting their not-so-friendly visions.

The remix of Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) CEO Patricia Woertz didn’t sit well; they successfully filed a takedown notice to have it removed from YouTube. The video, along with other lip dubs (Prince Harry and Nicholas Sarkozy, etc) remain live on Vimeo.

What I love about these is that they are so simple: just a minor tweak can make a copyrighted text Fair Use. The creators quoted the copyrighted material to create a new meaning through juxtaposition which is totally Fair Use as Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video makes clear.  By re-dubbing and re-editing the audio, the creators change the meaning of all three pieces of copyrighted material, addressing a very different audience than their intended original.

So simple and yet so effective.

“The Two Fridas” remake by Claire Ball

“The Two Fridas” by Frida Kahlo

“Composition With Red, Blue and Yellow” remake by Katie Jackson

“Composition With Red, Blue and Yellow” by Mondrian

“Birth of Venus” remake by Julio Cesar León Peña

“Birth of Venus” by Botticelli

“Luncheon on the Grass” remake by Ileana Alvarez Reyes

“Luncheon on the Grass” by Manet

“Self Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)” remake by Eda Te

“Self Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)” by Frida Kahlo

image source: booooooom

I’m not into the competition aspect of this thing but am down with stocking up on high quality b-roll, cutaways and unwatermarked archival content for future remixing use! You never know when you’re going to need a shot of prominent Muslim feminist Shukria Barakzai voting with red card in a room full of men in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Or video of women from 1910 in long dresses and huge hats doing unladylike activities like hopping over fences.

Or Kim Cattrall talking about how she only takes roles she feels are feminist & good for women.

Of course all of this footage can be used at any time outside of this silly Getty publicity event under Fair Use (but finding it without their logo watermark is getting difficult). In fact, back in 2008, in one of my first remixes, I relied heavily on Getty Image content, without their permission, to make a point: We can’t vote-in ‘change’ and it’s a stalled attempt at democracy to wait for change to be elected into the White House. I love when old work is still relevant.

So if you’re a remixer, artist, student, teacher, lawyer, arguer or just rely heavily upon video materials to prove your point, take a look through their archives and start pillaging!

When I leave the YouTube compound and venture over to Vimeo, the quality of content increases dramatically. The footage is crisp, it’s cut to the beat of the soundtrack and the title sequences are not your generic Arial Narrow Bold in a lower third. You can tell this is a site where white guys post their video. It looks good. It looks expensive and glossy and aesthetically pleasing. They have my attention. I want to watch their video.  But the shots lead no where. There’s no story or substance. It’s just images. Shot and framed really well. Why do I care?

So how can we steal their tactics for better causes outside of design aesthetics?

For remixers, we don’t have the luxury of being able to shoot and edit high-quality original footage so high definition, pure and crisp images aren’t going to happen. Making archival, found, ripped or YouTube footage look non-compressed and un-pixelated is tough, especially if you’ve got multiple sources for materials. It’s not going to look perfect. Let’s give that up now.

I’ve realized the trick to using Final Cut like a white guy who lives in Brooklyn is to never use Final Cut text generator for titles. Titles & text are what made those Vimeo videos look so good and differentiated them from the generic YouTube video. Again, I wanted to watch these videos because they were so pretty. Unfortunately they led no where. For those of us making socially conscious work, we need all the views we can get. Clean titles and text in remix is so important because everything else is cobbled together.  Literally. So, titles can be used as the visually appealing aspect that unites our disparate clips and makes our subversive video remix more aesthetically pleasing.White guys on Vimeo don’t use Final Cut for titles. They use Photoshop. Here’s how:

1. Open up Photoshop and and command N will make a new document.
2. Name your file and change preset to ‘custom’
3. Change the width and height of your file to the frame size of your Final Cut project. (In FCP, command 0 will bring up Sequence settings. Frame Size is the first detail.)
4. Change background contents to “transparent” and click OK.
5. Use the text tool to design your text.  You’ll see there’s a much wider selection of typefaces to chose from and you can actually preview what they look like vs. Final Cut’s guessing game. I like to use Helvetica Neue Light and Edwardian Script on a few key words.
6. When finished, save as TIFF.
7. In TIFF options select “save transparency” – this will ensure your titles fall over your video, not on a white background.
8. Click OK.
9.  Import into Final Cut.
10. Drag and drop over video. Render.

Final product:

I’m happy that Lena Dunham, of Tiny Furniture fame, has written and directed her own TV series for HBO at age 24. The show features Dunham as Hannah, a 24-year-old living in New York City and struggling to get by despite believing she is a voice of her generation. Or a generation.

What I see ripe for remix about this series is:

a. Another story about Straight White Girl Problems with a dose of

b. I Get By With A Little Help From My Parents syndrome sprinkled with

c. I Went To College And Everyone Said Things Would Be Different For Me perspective.

I hope I’m wrong; I hope the trailer is wildly misleading and it’s not a copy/paste of the lovable white-boy slacker role onto a liberal-arts-educated female lead. No one likes wearing hand-me downs, especially ill-fitting ones that weren’t all that great in the first place.

I also hope I’m wrong because it feeds into the stereotype of my peers and our millennial generation as narcissistic, entitled college grads who’ve never worked for much of anything and still expect results. At the first sign of failure (or conflict or hardship) we conveniently blame those around us hourly via twitter and facebook updates. This is widely different from the millennials I know who walked out of school to protest the Iraq & Afghan wars, who rebooted feminism, launched start ups & Occupied Wall Street.

image via New York Magazine

Make a new narrative in a way we haven’t seen yet instead of shooting the same stories for a different demographic. Then it would really be the voice of a generation. I’d love to see this trailer and/or series remixed into a story about post-Hope era millennial women sans navel gazing.

How much should the audience relate to the original story and how much should they take out of context when it comes to remix? I rely on the phrase remix storytelling when describing one-source remix works because I’m building a new narrative from scratch. But remixing requires using pop culture clips in and out of their original context, a confusing dynamic often done simultaneously depending on the video’s message. The problem I consistently run into is how much should the audience relate to the original story and how much should they take out of context? More importantly, how does the audience know to separate the images from their original context and how does one convey that separation from the onset?

1. I’ve been interested in the female voice-over ever since I saw Clueless at camp in 5th grade. There’s something about hearing the internal dialog of a lead female character tell a story, presumably her story, that draws me to the material. Conveniently, the voice over is the easiest thing to manipulate. A narrator’s words can be tweaked early on to give the audience the first sign post to take things out of context: this is a new world. I did this a lot in QueerCarrie but probably not early enough in the narrative. 
2. Choosing only shows with voice overs will solve this problem, however you’ll be severely limited in source material. For shows without a voice over, I’ve been experimenting with what I’ll call a main-character trait sign post. In Mad Men, for example, Don is our main hero and he’s not exactly a supportive husband or great father. He’s prone to yelling, throwing things and narcissistic put-downs that make the other person feel like theyare the crazy ones. Subverting Don’s seminal (pun intended) character traits early on let’s people know we’re operating in a new world. For example right now I’m toying with this scene:

   

Now remixed, after Betty yells the very applicable “You come home and get to be the hero!” Don says calmly, “You’ve had a hard week. I understand.” I took this dialog from an other scene and put it under Don’s cutaways, editing out everything else after it. But to make it work, the main character’s new traits have to be completely contradictory to their normal behavior, even if they aren’t the main character of your remix. And in my opinion, this has to come early on in the remix to be an effective sign post.

Except in this example. Here, every clip is kept in context. The transformative nature of the piece doesn’t come until the very end (and the very last scene at that) where we’re led to believe Betty killed Don.

The audience doesn’t separate from the original context until the very last scene and the suspense keeps us watching, knowing it’s different, just wondering how it is so. Witholding the transformative aspect until the very end renders the subversion paramount: the suspense becomes palpable when the climax is the raison d’etre.

If we keep every clip in context, how can we transform the original material enough to be fair use? And at what point does the audience need to know we’re in a new world? With multiple sources, I take everything out of context because, well, there’s more than one back story to negotiate. But with only one source, the remixer always plays a fine line.

PS: What do you want to read more about on this blog?

This interview with Meryl Streep restored my faith in female solidarity – I love the fact that she negotiated with Vogue, agreeing only to shoot the cover if some other powerful women were profiled, too.

My colleague and friend Melissa Silverstein over at Women And Hollywood did a fantastic interview with Diablo Cody on flawed female characters and feminism in the film industry. Cody is a co-chair of the Athena Film Festival, a weekend dedicated to women-made movies I’m involved with happening at Barnard College in February. I love this excerpt – it’s always nice to remember you’re not alone/crazy.

“The conventional knowledge in Hollywood is that an unsympathetic female character can tank a movie.  I’m hoping that’s not true… The idea of a cold, unlikeable woman or a woman who is not in control of herself is genuinely frightening to people because it threatens civilization itself or threatens the American family. 

But I don’t know why people are always willing to accept and even like flawed male characters.  We’ve seen so many loveable anti-heroes who are curmudgeons or addicts or bad fathers and a lot of those characters have become beloved icons and I don’t see women allowed to play the same parts.  So it was really important to me to try and turn that around.”

My favorite fabulous flawed females that remain likable in our cultural consciousness include Murphy Brown, Elaine Benes, Betty Draper and Kalinda Sharma but real life Streep & Cody came to my rescue this week. Who are some of the strong women and/or flawed female characters that keep you sane?

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Females seldom find themselves in the role of spectator; the camera almost always assumes the view point of the male characters and it seems to constantly watch, follow and pan women and their bodies. I’m not arguing for an objectification of men, just a female perspective as complex.

As Laura Mulvey explains it in the psychological thriller Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, women are the “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning”. This question of perspective and meaning was raised by Holly Willis after my USC talk on Monday night and as I work my way through the thickets of Mad Men, I’m realizing the ideal answer would be a Male Gaze Filter in Final Cut that allows the editor to flip the camera angle and see from the female characters’ perspective. This ‘filter’ is obviously dependent upon additional footage but it would change the narrative so drastically that it’s fun to think about how powerfully different our stories would be if there really was a such an add-on.

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“And so here at the End of Comedy, there’s nothing left to do but embrace a recycling ethic: shuffle the various well-established pieces around and hope someone chuckles. Have the “Odd Couple” guys baby-sit the “Modern Family” youngsters. Put Archie Bunker on a plane next to Corporal Klinger. No new shows need to be filmed; just open up the archives and let people create their own. Mash-Up TV. Sounds like the future.”

First, please do open up the archives. We the people need access to footage, high quality footage at that, already digitized and in proper file formats to be easily edited and quickly remixed. I shouldn’t have to wait for the DVD collectors set. The power of remix comes from responding quickly to our collective cultural consciousness.Second, mash it up! Yes! But as remixers, we have the ability to literally create a new, more just and inclusive media, not just recycle the old tropes and narratives. Wouldn’t it be terrible if we looked back and realized we had the opportunity to do things differently and didn’t? We just remixed the same crap into more crappy remix? With power comes responsibility. As creators we have a responsibility to not perpetuate harmful (not to mention stupid, old, tired and boring) stereotypes evident in our source materials. Why? Because for the most part, it wasn’t interesting, funny or subversive then and it sure isn’t now. So let’s edit it out and make something better.

Finally, no new shows need to be made…by the same people making them now. Why hire the same people over and over if their work is bad? Programs with no women creators or writers featured fewer female characters and the percentage of women working as writers on broadcast programs plummeted this season, declining to 15% while. Can we switch it up a bit? How about we hire awesome female remixers to write innovative shows? And mentor young women while we’re at it? This way we can finally spike that tired old setup: “Not enough women applied.”

1. Financial: Despite the bailouts, BoA has the lowest rates: 0.10% on a CD for one year? Are you kidding me? Why not just keep my money under my bed?
2. Rational: BoA dropped the $5 debit card fee after massive protests and petition campaigns but plans to release other fees beginning in 2012. No one knows what the fees are yet but Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Illinois) is encouraging customers to “vote with your feet. Get the heck out of that bank.”
3. Political: Check your anger at the door before you make a deposit! CEO Brian Moynihan says protesting customers will not be allowed in local branches because you can’t protest and be a customer at the same time.
4. Ethical: Despite blaming the economy for layoffs & its new fees, BoA continues to pay its executives pretty well. Former BoA CEO Ken Lewis’ received a $63 million retirement plan.
5. Other: BoA plans to lay off 30,000 employees, double what any other U.S.-based employer has announced so far this year.
6. Did you need another?: BoA received a $25 billion tax-payer bailout January 2009 but didn’t pay any taxes in 2009 or in 2010. BoA’s 2008 bailout was $15 billion.
7. 

For checking accounts there should have no minimum balance, no annual maintenance fees, free transfers to your other accounts (especially within the bank), free checks or bill pay and of course, easy and streamlined online banking. It’s a buyer’s market. If your bank doesn’t offer these you’ll find one that does. BoA, you’re dead to me.