Bob Blankenheim has only posted a single remix to the internet, but man…

Over 9 million youtube views so far. What was it about this remix that excited so many viewers? There were lots of other trailer mashes hitting the internet thanks to Robert Ryang’s Shining. But most trailer mashes focus on modifying the moods and premises of Hollywood advertisements--- Blankenheim’s remixed Titanic trailer goes way beyond this.

Probably you’ve already seen this remix. If you haven’t, go watch it now. Anyway I’ll try not to spoil it.

The remix trailer has more than a premise; it has a plot in which nearly every Hollywood trope converges against the protagonist. It’s a brilliantly insightful and hilarious parody of not only Titanic, but the whole supercharged drama business of Hollywood production and promotion (it uses clips from 23 different films).

Blakenheim has put a “director’s commentary” version of the video on his website– click here to go watch it if you feel like being blown away a 2nd time. You’ll get details on the CG and editing tricks he used in the remix. They’re seamless and lots of them are quite elaborate, but the creativity with which Blankenheim applies the simpler effects is equally impressive. I’m thinking in particular of two different effects he applies to a single closeup – one of them is during the “warm liquid goo phase….”

It’s been a few years since the Titanic sequel, but Bob Blankenheim’s involvement in the Open Video Conference tells us that he hasn’t lost interest in remixing. If/When he releases another video, I expect you’ll be hearing about it.

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Smearballs’ remixes are some of the most artfully arranged bits of trash video on the internet. They usually mine the detritus of television for their source material – soaps, daytime talk, infomercials... But if you watch closely you’ll notice how skillful Smearballs’ choices are. Every fragment has something about it that makes it compelling to watch: bizarre color arrangements, compositions that are perfect for inserting effects, little moments of television that are utterly baffling when they’re isolated.

Smearballs' mixes are funny but they’re also infectiously energetic: choice bits of audio from their clips are matched with music they record themselves; they apply digital effects with a graffiti writer’s instinct for impact and defacement; they insert themselves and their logos into the remixes with an overblown bravado that you can only cheer for. So while they make you laugh they also blow you away.

On their blog, Smearballs recently advanced the following thesis to summarize their position on some of the major stakeholders of online culture: “Smearballs is the future and they're livin' in it.” If you would like to see some supporting evidence for this argument, I invite you to watch some Smearballs videos below.

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D.M. Phoenix (DMP) is an accomplished artist in many regards (See his impressively designed portfolio site at phoenixium.com – drawings, CG, flash, etc…). Sometimes, when he finds the time, he makes a video mashup on youtube. But you can expect a lot more from your mashup when it’s being cut together by someone like DMP, who has dedicated so much of his life to making art, and who has an unmistakable passion for science fiction and for pleasing an audience.

As you might expect there are a number of “Star Trek vs Star Wars” mashes on the Internet, but what distinguishes the “DMP edition” is its persistent showmanship. DMP’s combinations of different video sources are indeed technically accomplished, but they go further than that: he chooses cutaways that give a precise emotional tone to the interactions between characters; he discreetly repeats certain clips to fine-tune the narrative pace and comic timing of his scenes; he always keeps an eye open for opportunities to twist the footage into a good joke.

“Star Wars Vs. Star Trek” is DMP’s most elaborate and popular remix so far, but I hope he can find the time to make some more. We stand to gain a lot whenever artists with solid multidisciplinary backgrounds decide to come play in our sandbox.

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The bulk of Augart’s video remixes are rhythmic collages composed of movie fragments that he organizes by subject matter – car crashes, gunshot blasts, horror movie screams. Augart is often drawn to the loudest of Hollywood movie stimuli, but other subjects can draw his eye: long before Kutiman released his “Thru You” remixes of youtube musicians, Augart had already completed the same experiment in his own style with “Youtube Symphony.”

Augart works in the tradition of rhythmical audiovisual cutups established by veteran video artists like Tasman Richardson. But Augart’s style is very much his own. His remixes make art out of the distortion and digital artifacts of youtube-era video. He delights not only in the deep booming payoffs of Hollywood sound effects, but also in the auxiliary effects that don’t typically win our attention: little clicks of people preparing their firearms, the trebly scrapes of metal in the first nanoseconds of a head-on collision. Augart manipulates not only the sensory impact of his source materials, but also the cultural expectations built up around them (for a great example, watch what he does with the firm cadence of marching soldiers in “The Parade”).

If you’re looking for something to keep your eyes stuck to the monitor and your brains pulsing to the rhythm, Augart’s cutups will make a great evening’s viewing. You can watch higher resolution versions of his videos on his myspace page:
www.myspace.com/augartmedia

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The official Misshapen Features website has gone down, but I was happy discover that they haven’t disappeared altogether. They’re best known for the epic “Starlords” video, which mashes up two of the planet’s biggest corporate fantasy franchises: Star Wars vs Lord of the Rings. The first half of the movie skilfully combines parallels between the two sources in the tradition of other internet trailer mashups, but the payoff in the second half resembles no remix you’ve ever seen before.

Misshapen Features takes special care in choosing which sets of footage they mash together, always searching for novel similarities between sources that play on our imaginations and explore peculiarities of our mass commercial culture. They build a miniature love movie starring two stars of fake reality (Lonley Girl meets Borat). They experiment with mixing two effects-saturated comicbook movies for boys (300 Days of Night). One on their mashups deliberately takes one of the most sampled songs of all time (It's Just Begun by The Jimmy Castor Bunch) and plays it in its entirety alongside remixed video footage (the effect is impressive, but that didn’t stop youtube’s copyright bots from recently stripping the video’s soundtrack).

The videos are entertaining but you can detect their critical edge. You may come away from them feeling there’s lots of things wrong and strange about a culture where a handful of companies show the same content to millions of viewers simultaneously. If you don’t know what to do about it, maybe Misshapefeatures’ work will convince you that part of the solution involves taking this footage and remixing it for yourself.

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Tasman Richardson has been working with appropriated footage since the 90s and the “Jawa” style he developed has been adopted and imitated by a significant number of VJs and video artists. He works with potent sounds and images from commercial culture, which he cuts into small fragments and rhythmically reassembles.

Richardson’s remix methods are rigorous and quite specific – designed to evoke a distinct emotional reaction from viewers. Jawa videos follow set standards regarding the number of frames that can be used in different cuts. There's also rules on how clips of particular durations should be combined. The clips are arranged rhythmically, but the visual and musical impact of the work are always operating simultaneously – neither ever takes priority over the other. In a Jawa video, the images you see are always accompanied by their original audio sources. Click here if you'd like to read Richardson's Jawa manifesto, which outlines his remixing influences and principles.

As you watch a Jawa video it becomes impossible to mentally organize all of its rapid stimulus. Powerfully familiar images from mass culture replace each other so quickly that your brain gives up trying to sort them into any sort of narrative logic. The unrelenting rhythms and flashes of audiovisual stimulus create an overwhelming and numbing effect that is very hard to describe. Maybe it’s like watching your house burn down with fireworks going off in the background.

Below are some youtube embeds of Tasman’s work, but if you’d like to see the videos in higher quality, you can visit his website at www.tasmanrichardson.com/video.htm

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Aside from being made completely of appropriated footage, Pogo's movies fit very nicely into the "music video" tradition. They function to highlight and accompany his amazing musical tracks, which he composes out of samples usually taken from popular children's movies -- Harry Potter, The Secret Garden, Mary Poppins... In several tracks, Pogo will take small acapella bits from the films and rearrange them into entirely new melodies. The fragments of words and instruments build and ebb into engaging and haunting songs, with both the polished flow and dynamics of an accomplished DJ and a sense of that strange magic some of us might have felt when we were little children, sitting at the TV on our livingroom carpets and soaking in all the hypnotizing stimulus of our first disney films.

Pogo mixes his movie sources with varying amounts of other samples and beats, but he also makes songs like "Mary's Magic," which is 100% composed of sounds from the movie "The Secret Garden." The track for Pogo's popular "Alice" video is 90% composed of the sounds from "Alice in Wonderland." Pogo typically chooses a single movie as the source material for his respective tracks and music videos.

Once Pogo shifts to filmmaker mode, he rigorously arranges his visuals to draw in the viewer: he hits us with short clips of the images that correspond with his audio sources, he adjusts the speed of other scenes to fit the beat, he plays with jump cuts, repetition, he builds little variations by rotating or resizing the frame. Pogo uses an exhaustive range of video editing techniques to build a hypnotizing effect that seems well-suited for someone with such a solid musical background. And it obviously doesn't hurt that he often chooses such richly colorful movies as sources for his remixes.

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Given that this trio of editors has chosen to give themselves the name "Wreck & Salvage," it's not surprising to find their body of work repeatedly raising the question of how we get value out of all the video footage that floods our lives. The sources W&S draw from are as varied as the internet: corporate news and commercials, internet memes, ephemeral daytime television, propaganda, archive footage, and plenty of amateur video, be it from youtube kids or soldiers serving in Iraq. Their artistic priorities are just as diverse: their Eadweard Muybridge tribute celebrates and explores the awkward magic of moving images; their "Saturday Morning" mix drives home the stifling forcefulness of ultra-bright, fast cutting, relentlessly mercenary children's programming; and the group doesn't mind putting together a quick detournement now and then to take the piss out of some of the more absurd excesses of right-wing propaganda (see "NOM: Gathering Gay Storm; SUPPENDAPO" for a recent example). W&S edits all this footage to look for ways to make it useful, either politically, socially, artistically, or all of the above.

All three members of W&S are comfortable with nearly any digital editing technique you could think of. But perhaps their most important contribution to online remixing is what they've accomplished with "farming" for footage. Some of their most powerful remixes are made up of extensively researched footage collections organized around various themes or subject matter: Club Iraq combines a large number of amateur video clips from soldiers in the Iraq war to give us a powerful and disturbing picture of the culture of military occupation; their Mt. Rushmore remix collects amateur video of the monument and traces the diverse motivations for getting your own personal recording of an image you could find on a million postcards; "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" builds a montage of soloists, amateur and professional, who appear in sequence and together sing the whole song. These exploratory remixes take the impulses of obsessive video-bin hunters and combine them with a movie editor's insight to sculpt raw footage into rich, rewarding videos. These guys advertise themselves as Wreckers and Salvagers, and they make good on that promise.

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AMDS is the internet's reigning master of combining separate source footage into visually seamless masterpieces. He has built an impressively varied body of remix work -- from abstract style experiments to PSAs about gun control and traffic safety. But he is best known for tackling the biggest and loudest Hollywood franchises and mixing their heroes together into "dream matches" that draw millions of ecstatic viewers: Neo vs Robocop, Terminator vs Robocop, Arnie vs Sly... With the media industry spending huge sums of money trying to generate an appetite for more and more and more, it was only a matter of time before someone like AMDS came along with a do-it-yourself method for fulfilling the dearest wishes of the world's movie buffs.

A few moments watching AMDS' remixes should convince you of his skills for digital effects and visual storytelling. He carefully manipulates the color hue of his material to create a vivid sense of unity between separate bits of source footage. He inserts quick, inventive digital-effects shots which place the different action heroes together in the same frame. This fall he will be releasing the third episode of his "Terminator VS Robocop" series. The film is 22 minutes long and the trailers AMDS has released for it are already pushing the limits of digital footage manipulation to levels that I've never seen outside of big-budget Hollywood productions.

It would take me too long to itemize the extensive techniques AMDS employs to achieve his effects, so I'll just encourage you to go watch his work -- he has managed to take clips of Hollywood's most marketed action stars and transform them into movies where the biggest star is AMDS.

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Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party and the international politicized pirate movement, talks about the rise and success of pirates, and why pirates are necessary in today's politics. He'll also outline the next steps in the pirates' strategy to change global copyright laws. The fight against copyright aggression tends to focus on economic aspects of the shift to a networked economy. Rick explains how this conflict is much more important than that: the fight against the copyright regime is about the right to fundamental civil liberties - down to the postal secret, whistleblower protection, freedom of the press, etc.    UPDATE