Remix Alot

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

I know I'm late to the game on this one, but I was checking out the blog of Vincent Laforet and his most recent post about Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" series of videos. I'm late because Part 4 was released last month.

All that aside, I went back and watched the first four parts and was really amazed by the content and concepts presented. Really thought provoking stuff on copyright, reuse, credit, etc.

"FrankenVideo" is a term I've used for the past couple of years to describe what I sometimes find myself doing in my job with the Office of Naval Research. Much like the Frankenstein monster who was made up of many parts, most of the requests for videos I get are made up of many file formats and come from multiple sources. My job is to rearrange them to tell a coherent story. Additionally, copyright never seems to be an issue until I bring it up. Piecing these videos together is laborious, mostly because of the constraints of government oversight of the computer systems, along with unreasonable time frames. I get the job done, but just like making sausage, you don't want to know how I made it.

Not entirely the same as Ferguson's Remix series and I as I write this, maybe it is nothing like the series at all, however, there is one similarity. I do manage to take lots of parts of existing work and fashion an entirely different product. And much of the work is already publicly released, or even produced in house, so in that sense we are protected from copyright infringement. But what if a snippet here or there was from a copyrighted source?

Take the time to check out the entire series by visiting Ferguson's blog. Watching the series takes no time at all, thinking about the content, well...