Reflection
This week we are learning about remixing archival footages. I didn’t have a clear understanding of remixing archival footage before this week, because I used to think that all videos that used other people’s material could cause plagiarism. I changed my opinion after reading ‘steal like an artist’ by Austin Kleon(2012), he claims that remixing work is not plagiarism. He says that plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own while copying is about reverse-engineering. His explanation of remix is very interesting, with a lot of illustrations to let us better understand. And it ’s really convincing that he uses the example of people grow up by studying others to illustrate. In “beautiful word”(2010), the director uses the archival footage to construct the whole music video. I think this is very creative, although it uses old videos.The audience can never know what will happen in the next second, which attracts them to keep watching. And the content that appears in these archive videos is also very humorous and interesting.
After learning so many examples of remixing archive videos, I made a video about Apollo 11 for this week. Apollo 11 is the first human project on the moon. It is an important milestone in the history of human development. In the process of making the video, I found that the hardest part was collecting materials. These archive videos often take two to three hours, but we may only need one scene from these videos. It is hard to find a suitable scene. And we need to download the entire video, which is also very troublesome. My video is about space, but what I want to express through it is something on earth. People spend a lot of resources and time exploring the world beyond the earth, but ignore the ecology on earth. It ’s beautiful to see the scene of the earth when landing on the moon. But as the environment continues to be destroyed, the condition of the earth is getting worse and worse. We can no longer see the beautiful earth in the documentary. So I want to use this little video to remind people to protect the environment
Beautiful World. 2010. [MV]. Directed by Devo
Kleon, A., & Ebrary, Inc. (2012). Steal like an artist 10 things nobody told you about being creative. New York: Workman Pub