In preparation for our week on remix and your upcoming video essay project, below you’ll find some examples of “genres” of remix that you might choose to work with for your project. Remember that you should let your chosen argument determine the form the argument takes (e.g. some arguments will be better suited to a fake trailer, others will be more productive to construct as a more classical video essay). We’ll discuss these genres, and the project, in more detail next week: feel free to link to other remixes you find effectively convey a point or argument here, or via twitter or email.
The Video Essay
This perhaps is closest to a conventional academic paper, using images, text and frequently some form of voiceover to clearly convey an argument with supporting evidence from scholarly works. Below is a good example, on censorship practices and the depiction of sex in Hollywood cinema.
Sex and Sensation: How Hollywood Popped Its Cherry (Student Video Essay) from Kelli Marshall on Vimeo.
The Fake Trailer
The fake trailer typically rests on a humorous juxtasposition of genres and aesthetics, and presumes a knowledge about the conventions of both Hollywood genres and the “form” of trailers as a genre in their own right. One of the more famous early examples recut The Shining to play as a romantic comedy. The example below inverts that premise, reimagining Mary Poppins as a Horror Movie.
The Fanvid
Per our reading from Francesca Coppa this week, fanvids typically use a popular song which, when juxtaposed with a series of images from a media property, conveys some form of argument. The video below is more celebratory than argumentative (we’ll watch some examples of the latter next week), and it’s also a metavid (a vid about fandom itself), but in general it’s a good example of the style of fanvids. In particular, note the various “passages” here, where similar images are cut together in rapid succession to create a sort of visual chorus or stanza. Plus, spaceships!
Starships! from bironic on Vimeo.
The Lipdub
In its simplest form, the lipdub is a video that combines some form of lip synching and dubbed audio. Below, you’ll find a more complex iteration titled “Imagine This.” Though producing a video on this level might require more time than you’re afforded for this assignment, it conveys a clear argument, so it might be useful to consider doing a scaled down version of something like this (this Mad Men video being a possible example).
The Mashup
Technically, almost all remixes can be categorized as “mashups,” but for the purposes of demarcating this as its own category, we’ll use “mashup” to broadly define a video that combines two texts to create a new one. Below, Jonathan McIntosh’s “Buffy vs. Edward” mashes up Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight to create new narrative that implicitly addresses the gender politics of both franchises. Also to note for next week: McIntosh went to court for this video, and won claiming fair use, in 2012 after Lionsgate had the video taken down from YouTube.
Course blog for ASU's Intro to New Media 