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Module 2 - Creative Project

Go Viral

tl;dr: Appropriate existing online content to create a sound or video piece that you think could go viral. Create either a remix, mashup or supercut (time-based media) and share it online. Document and reflect on the response to your project.

Due Date: Monday, Oct 10, 9pm (see full timeline)

Gallery Pool: Go Viral

• Brief and goals
• Learning Objectives
• Considerations and Constraints
• Deliverables
• Timeline and Process
• Approaches, Inspiration and Context
• Documentation

Brief and Goals

As part of this project, you’re going to experiment remixing and spreadability. You’ll be asked to consider how you can rework existing footage (from YouTube, movies, songs or other sources) into something new. If you’re in the sound labs, you’re going to create an audio remix. And if you’re in the visual labs you’re going to create a video remix.

Specifically, the goals will be to:

• Create a digital remix, mashup or supercut that reworks media that already exists;
• Create a compelling media experience that someone would like to watch and share with others;
• Think about the ways you can spread your media and get people to share it;
• Share that media experience online and observe how people respond to it; and
• Try to get it seen by, remixed or shared by as many people as possible.

You’re going to need to ask two things:

1. How do I make a interesting remix?
2. How can I use the internet to make sure it is seen?

In terms of the remix, you have the latitude to interpret this broadly, but it may be helpful to focus on one type of remix that you find most interesting to experiment with.

A “remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original.” ^*

The remix is generally focused on a single principle piece of content that is reworked in some way. A good example of this would be reducing political debates into just the moments of silence, reordering a movie to alphabetize the words spoken by actors, to sequences the scenes by color or reorganize them like making Memento chronological, recutting movie trailers, or making rap from TED Talks.

“A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another.” ^*

A mashup is generally lots of samples that are masterfully interwoven to create something new and distinctive. There’s lots of examples of this in the audio domain and particularly in pop and electronic music e.g. Girl Talk. Another great example is The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, a mashup of Jay Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles’ The White Album. Johan Söderberg’s ‘Read My Lips: Bush and Blair’ edits news footage to make it appear as though world leaders were singing pop songs. Wreckandsalvage’s Call and Response explores imitation (the repetition of a melody in a polyphonic texture) as a structure for remixing adverts. Cory Arcangel’s Arnold Schoenberg’s, Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11-I played by cats on pianos blends footage of cats from YouTube into a performance.

A supercut is a “genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.” ^*

A supercut is a much more thematic combination of media into a mashup. Typically a supercut explores a single thing found in multiple sources (often movies or TV) and brings them together to give a perspective on it’s prevalence or more often than not it’s overuse. Most focus on overused dialogue, themes, motifs, filmmaking techniques. Examples include the phases like “Get out of there”, “It’s showtime”, “Let’s enhance” or the word ‘What’ on TV’s Lost. But it can also include many more thought provoking examples like: Leigh Singer’s exploration of Breaking the Fourth Wall, Vugar Efendi’s analysis of art meeting film, Celia Gómez’s visual exploration of the first and final Frames of well known TV series, Candice Drouet’s touching Last Words a story told through The Last Words From 129 Films she’s watched, and more politised perspectives like Obama’s references to spending. If you’re working with a supercut make sure you fix your theme early and make sure you’ve enough content to make it work.

Whether you choose a remix, mashup or supercut, try to take a critical or tactical approach to the content you produce. Think artfully about the intent behind your remix: what are you trying to say? does it have a point to make? is it recontextualising something familiar and to what end? Keep in mind the discussion of what makes good spreadable media: it either responds to something in the world, society or culture or it’s expressive, beautiful nonsense that delights and entertains. You’re free to choose either, but think about what you make; don’t just make something for the sake of it.

Keep the spreading part in mind. It’s easy to overlook this and think it’s as simple as putting it on Vine, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Twitter and Facebook. In fact it’s the hardest part. You’ll need to think about how you can get people to see your work and value it enough to share it. Spread and sharing happens differently across each platform . Do you want to share your outcome on lots or focus on spreading through one community? Remember that there’s also over 30 people in the class who will be sharing content at the same time and your social networks might overlap; if so you’ll be competing for eyeballs on your work. But if you plan carefully, you can engineer large spread and visibility for your work. You’ll need to investigate strategies for this and propose uncommon ways to reach audiences with your creative work.

Learning Objectives

In this exercise, you’ll explore internet art, spreadable media and remix culture. Specifically, you are asked to:

1. Become familiar with the design of remixed media through applied exploration;

2. Develop you skills in making connections across media and content and across art movements.

3. Study, investigate and test the relationship between remix culture and spreadable media;

4. Acquire new skills or knowledge of new media tools and workflows for creating remixes, mashups and supercuts;

5. Explore how media spreads by putting your media out into the world.

Considerations and Constraints

Constraints:

• You must work digitally and with a time-based format (video or audio);
• You must create a remix, mashup or supercut.
• You must work with content that isn’t yours and rework/edit it into a new outcome;
• You must work independently; and
• You must share your work publicly online.
• The final outcome must be at least 2 minutes in length and ideally should be no more than 4 minutes.
• If you’re in the sound lab you must work with audio. If you’re within the visual labs, you must work with video.

Considerations:

• Critical Perspective: What is the point of your remix? Don’t just remix for the sake of it. Make it say something. Consider how you can take a critical, beautiful or interesting perspective on media, society or internet culture through the act of remixing. Build on ideas of culture jamming, tactical/critical media, etc that you’ve encoutered in the module and the work we’ve reviewed.
• Found Footage: Where are you going to get the content you need? There are thousands of hours of footage available in public domain and creative commons sources. Check the references and resources section for this module. There’s a list there.
• Watchability/listenability The secret to a good remix is that it can be watched/listened to/digested easily. Try to keep you remix short. You’ll notice that most video/audio is only a few minutes long (a good YouTube video is often less than 3 minutes). Fixing the duration upfront is often a good first constraint to impose. After that, you’ll need to pay attention to good editing techniques. Avoid long sequences where someone could get bored or stop watching. Pay attention to how you blend and cut across scenes, shots or samples. If you’re dealing with visual content can you organize the content or treat it to balance with preceeding/succeeding shots.
• Spread: How are you going to encourage people to share your media so that more people see it? Simple things like the title you give it or the tweet you share it with matter. Clickbait works for a reason after all! Can you engage some of the original creators (tagging them in a tweet or post?) to help it spread? Also think about who you want to see it (is it particular communities? ) and what you want them to do with it (do you only want them to see it or would you like them to remix it too?).

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver five things for this exercise:

1. Remix: The final digital remix that you have created.
2. Statement: An artist’s statement of the intent and ideas that drove the creation of the work (approx 100 words).
3. Response: Document the spread and response to the content.
4. Narrative A description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed and the strategies you used to translate the work
5. Reflection: A critical reflection on outcome and it’s success. This would mirror the approach you took for the looking out exercise.

Process and Timeline

• Concept Development: Start by develping a statement on the work. This should include the major themes, ideas, message and meaning behind your intented work. Imagine how this is executed. This will form the basic for your proposal.

• Proposal: Create a proposal for your creative project (200 words + illustrations) and share on the Gallery. This should specify a) a brief description of the proposed remix b) sources and samples you’ll need or know you’ll work with, and c) how you propose to spread and share the outcome.

• Digital Crit: You’ll receive feedback from your peers on the concept by 9pm that night.

• Development: You’ll have one week to prepare a first cut of your remix. For this you’re expected to complete initial edits of your sources into usable samples. Ideally implement a basic rough cut of the project to demonstrate your concept.

• Desk Crit: Bring in an early stage version of the work for discussion during the in-class desk crits. You’ll get feedback from instructors and from your peers (Thursday, Oct 6, 9am).

• Iterate: After the class you’re expected to integrate feedback and advance the outcome. This should be documented as part of your process.

• Deliver: Deliver your final outcome and documentation (see below) by Monday, Sept 19, 9pm

• Digital Crit: You’ll give feedback to two projects and vote on projects to review in class by 9am Tuesday.

• In Class Presentation: A small number of projects (4-6) will be selected for detailed discussion in class. Presenters will give a 1-2 minute introduction to their work.

Approaches, Inspiration and Methods

There are countless ways you could approach this project. Check the resource sections for lots of other places to look.

A starting point… Getting an Idea a.k.a. The Remix Method #1

Kirby Ferguson author of ‘Everything is a Remix’ provides some insight on how to approach remixing.

Another incredibly helpful things to do before you start this project is to watch/listen to other remixes that you want to emulate. Think about are they made and what tools and techniques they use.

Beyond this seek out guides, tutorials and tools on making your kind of content. For example,

Audio Remixes/Mashups

• Using AudioGrep to make Automatic Audio “Supercuts”
• VideoGrep
• Videogrep: Automatic Supercuts with Python

Supercuts

• How to Make a Supercut
• This Programmer Will Show You How To Make Instant Movie Supercuts

Examples

For a phenomenal list of remixes, look at Cut Up an exhibition of remixes across: supercuts, recut trailers, political parody, songifications, music video mashups, trackjacking, recomposing, and vidding (click each header for examples).

Remixes

Sidebar: Also look at the user’s full set of content. It contain’s a “history of Subversive Remix Video before YouTube: Thirty Political Video Mashups Made between World War II and 2005”

Sidebar: find more examples of pre-YouTube subversive and political remixes and mashups in this article

Mashups

Sidenote: Check out Pogo’s YouTube channel which includes Bloom a patchwork of vocals and musical chords from various Disney films, Jaaam a fresh prince mashup, Boo Bass and Upular

Sidebar: Kutiman’s insanely viral ThruYou Project weaves various samples from amateur YouTube performances. Worth a look.

Supercuts

The definitive list can be found at http://waxy.org/2008/04/fanboy_supercuts_obsessive_video_montages/. The Creator’s project has an extensive catalog and Kottke.org maintains a great list too.

Sidebar: Pay attention to the careful and rigorous citation of sources in this supercut

Sidebar: Look at the number of blogs, feeds and sites that have shared Rishi’s work.

Documentation:

Include a write up of the following:

• Statement - Include the statement you created for the work. What is the intention? what are the big ideas behind your project? what are the goals? why did you make it? what are your motivations?

• Context - Include references and discussion of artists, artworks, movements or aesthetic frameworks/techniques/approaches that inspired your outcome, process or approach. What has informed your outcome? How does your outcome relate to other artists and their work? What ideas, styles, or themes did you draw on any why?

• Process - Describe how you translated your concept into the outcome. How did you approach the exercise? What were the design choices? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them? What ideas did you generate and how did you refine or reject them? What approaches did you reject?

• Product - Describe the outcome. What did you create, how, etc.? How did you compose your remix? What styles, methods or techniques did you use? What tools and technologies were involved?

• Critique - Critically evaluate the success of your own work. What does your inner critic say about this work? Did you match intent and outcome effectively? (note: use the framing questions to guide your response!)

• Personal Reflection - Briefly outline what you took away from this project. What did you learn? What would you do differently?

• Sources - Cite and attribute any sources you used directly in your project. Document this carefully: be very clear about what media you worked with, where you found it and how/where it was incorporated.

• References: Reference and attribute any texts, concepts, ideas or related material that informed but wasn’t directly used in the creation of the outcome.

Each of these sections should be no more than 200 words max. and well illustrated (images, videos, etc.)

For the Project Info’s goal description: it must be tweetable - summarise your outcome in no more than 140 characters