About Remixing
Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.
Pablo Picasso
In the realm of ideas, techniques, and styles, most artists know that stealing (or call it "being influenced" if you want to sound legitimate) is not only OK, but desirable and even crucial to creative evolution. This proven route to progress has prevailed among artists since art began and will not be denied. To creators, it is simply obvious in their own experience.
Negativland
It's not where you take things from. It's where you take them to.
Jean-Luc Godard
Mix? Mash?
The terms may be new but the ideas themselves are time-honoured.
Remix is all about taking existing material and making something new out of it. It’s a familiar concept in music but extends to all creative content. The Director’s Cut of a movie could equally be called a Director’s Mix.
But why confine yourself to one source? When you take two or more pieces of music or video and put them together in a new way, it’s called a mash-up. Here’s a classic mashup of Brokeback Mountain and Back to the Future:
In a broader sense any film that utilises prior source footage, such as a documentary, can be considered a mash-up.
The Copyright Catch
So you’ve got a great idea for a film that, say, mashes up Citizen Kane and footage from Outfoxed, the documentary film about Fox News. You plan a biting commentary on the power of today’s big media.
Think again! Without permissions from the copyright holders you aren’t legally entitled to use either of these source materials.
Music is equally problematic. Even classical recordings that you would think are in the public domain could be under copyright, since the performances themselves may be dated more recently. Often the greatest expense for low-budget films is in clearing the rights for music, commonly because the film-maker hasn’t thought through the legal status of the soundtrack.
Creative Commons
The impediments to creative reuse posed by copyright law are real and significant. There are a number of solutions for the creative artist. Permissions to use material in a specific context can be purchased, although this can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Alternatively, there is a wealth of material in the public domain, which does not belong to anybody and can be used as you see fit. By its nature, however, much PD source material is old and ill-maintained. Even if public domain material is suitable, ensuring that content is actually out of copyright can be difficult and time-consuming.
Considerations such as these have led to the development of Creative Commons, a system which explicitly promotes the use and reuse of creative content. Creative Commons replaces the ‘All Rights Reserved’ copyright regime with one that instead states ‘Some Rights Reserved’, allowing creators to protect themselves from exploitation without needing to unnecessarily restrict the ways in which their work can be used.
In the Citizen Kane mash-up example given earlier, a filmmaker wanting to reuse footage from Outfoxed would be in for a pleasant surprise. Director Robert Greenwald decided after completing the film to publish the original source footage under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. He says:
"In making Outfoxed, I learned how cumbersome and expensive it can be to license footage from news organizations. The Creative Commons license, as used here, allows me as a filmmaker to know immediately how I can use a piece of content in my films. I could think of no better way to walk the talk myself than by releasing the interviews from Outfoxed here under a license that allows other filmmakers to use my material in new and creative ways. I look forward to seeing what others do with these interviews.”
To give you a personal look at Remixing and what it means we have an interview with one of our judges, Hackney based, Greg Hall.
Click here to read his interview
