Monday 16 December 2013

Everything is a Remix

Kirby Ferguson is a New York-based filmmaker, and creator of dozens of comedic short films, which have received over four million views on the web.

Three years ago he put out a four-part documentary in which he argued that everything is a remix, and that all original material builds off of and remixes previously existing material.

The following video is all four parts of the documentary, and two supplements, glued together into a single video. Such a format may be better for a "lean and watch" mode as it does not require switching between videos and removes some duplicate content. It also removes Kirby's foreword from the end of parts one through three leaving only the one at the end.


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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Henry, I never would have wandered the maze of videos and supplementary information, so I really appreciate you turning it into one video.

This is an extremely well researched documentary. It shows how blatantly Led Zeppelin copied other musicians, it showed the origin of many Star Wars scenes, it even demonstrates a Quentin Tarantino movie as a mash-up.

The writer is scathing about how 'When we copy, we justify. When others copy, we vilify' and he shows hypocritical behavior by Apple founders who boasted about copying and who ended by suing others who copied them. (I thought it was clever that the words 'Intellectual Property' were introduced in a black spreading ink blot.)

Nevertheless the author contends that copying is a positive force: we ground ourselves in the fundamentals through copying. Major advances are made which are not original but are tipping points in a continuous line of invention. The biggest breakthroughs are made when ideas are combined.

Really well thought out, with real life examples which are shocking and which I hadn't known about. A bit old fashioned with little guidance for the future, but you can't have everything.