Fair Use Videos of the Month

cropped-colored_0_1Elisa Kreisinger is “a feminist video remixer making better stories about women that don’t revolve around men (or babies!) through remix storytelling.”  You can check out her work, including her most popular remix work of Sex and the City at her website . Here, she offers her choices for fair use video of the month. If you love them and feel inspired to make your own video, check out our Code of Best Practices in Online Video and Elisa’s free remix resources  and start remixing!

 

October 2011: "French Democracy"

In 2005, a series of protests and “riots” erupted outside Paris in response to the electrocution of two North African boys during a police chase. Upset by how the mass media portrayed the incident, a 27 year old gamer named Alex Chan  created a short video about the event from the prospective of frustrated Asian, Arab and African immigrant youth in France using machinima,  a form of DIY filmmaking that uses virtual video game environments and in-game characters to tell new narrative. Read more…

November 2011: "I'm Not Here To Make Friends"

Rich Juzwiak began noticing an odd trend in competition-based reality shows so he began to collect them off his DVR and edit them together . Once remixed and repeated, the absurdity and anti-social nature of reality tv reveals itself. This simple supercut remix manages to quickly illustrate how competition can cultivate and encourage deeply anti-social and individualist behavior. Never in any real-life social situation outside the hyper-constructed world of reality tv would someone say the words “I’m not here to make friends”. Read more

January 2012: "The Yes Men"

The Yes Men employed fair use to provide a critique of economic and political leaders’ public pronouncements (and their actions). As the 2012 World Economic Forum began in Davos Switzerland, these Yes Men remixes (created in 2010) provided a dissident variation on the forum’s new theme: The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models. Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) immediately filed a takedown notice to remove the remix of its CEO Patricia Woertz from YouTube (check Vimeo, though, here , and here , and here ), and The Yes Men’s parallel website we-forum.org.

February 2012: "For Your Consideration"

This Academy Awards Supercut is a guided tour through the prominent female directed films not nominated or recognized during this past award season. With a focus on the Academy of Arts and Sciences whose voting population is 94% white, 77% male, and 62 is the average age, the supercut places clips of each women-made movie back to back, illustrating how women have moved beyond the problems of ‘not creating enough work,’ the often cited excuse for women’s missing place at the content-creators’ table. Launched before the Oscars, the video generated 15,000 views in just 48 hours, launching a discussion throughout the web and social networks about why and how no one heard of these films.

April 2012: Don Loves Roger

Don Loves Roger  mashes up every episode of Mad Men and remixes it into a story about  two men who once preserved concepts of manhood and masculinity but then found relief and happiness in each other, becoming a threat to the very same patriarchal system on which their power and privilege was based. In this remixed narrative, Don has an opportunity to subvert rather than selling traditional masculinity.

March 2012: "Mad Men: Set Me Free"

Sung by your favorite female characters, Mad Men: Set Me Free is a musical mash up by Marc Faletti and I. As Peggy, Joan and Betty sing the Motown hit “You Keep Me Hanging On”,  the entirely female-framed version of Mad Men becomes an entertaining and refreshing re-articulation of female frustrations amidst rigid gender roles.

June 2012: "African Men. Hollywood Stereotypes."

In an effort to combat stereotypes of African men in mainstream Hollywood movies, Joe Sabia created this docu-mashup for a non-profit organization called Mama Hope. The organization works with local African groups to connect them with the resources required to transform their own communities.