Elephants Dream is another great short from the Blender Foundation (the guys behind Big Buck Bunny) about two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protégé Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect”.
Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.
McDonald’s has partnered with MySpace to bring you the Big Mac Chant-Off, a competition that lets you mash-up the music from their audio kit, or lay down a track of your own, with the winning remix appearing in the next McDonald’s commercial.
The only rule: You still need to use the original lyrics.
Say it with me now: Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.
Proving that a strange voice, a stranger song, and a video on YouTube can turn you into an instant celebrity, Tay Zonday is back, and this time, he has remixed his Chocolate Rain hit to help promote Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper.
With an over the top music video accompanying his second single, this is sure to be the talk of the water cooler for the next day or two at least, so prepare yourself:
Bob Ostertag’s w00t “is a free, internet-only release composed entirely from fragments of music from video games”.
Created as a collage of computer game sound and image, it’s Bob’s first release “to skip the CD-for-sale stage and go directly to free Internet download, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license”.
What does that mean?
It means Ben encourages you to “download, copy, send to your friends, remix, mutilate, and mash-up” his music as long as you share in the same manner.
YouTube’s Remixer is a web app that, in collaboration with Adobe’s Premiere Express, allows you to “create remixes by combining video clips, photos, and music with graphic effects, and transitions.”
Sometimes, instant gratification video is just the thing you need.
If you’ve ever uploaded from your cell phone, wished for an easy way to add titles and transitions, or just wanted to remix your own videos, Remixer is a great place to play. It lets you assemble your new video in an easy drag-and-drop timeline, and then publish it right back to YouTube. Your original videos will stay exactly the same.
Though you’re not going to be cranking out Academy Award wining films with this thing any time soon, it will be good to see a little flair added to the “hey, look what my new camera phone can do” videos that are currently proliferating the ‘Tube. Blair Witch 2, here I come.
Looking for that next great business idea that’s going to take you to the top and make you millions? Let the Ad Generator run wild for a few minutes, and inspiration is sure to follow. “Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr” and a complete advertisement is created. The results are surprisingly accurate and creative for such an automated process, and it does make you wonder about the language of advertising that is both “deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold”. I’ll take two.
This remix featuring Kanye West’s Gold Digger and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony gives a pretty good idea of what it would be like for modern day music stars to combine talents with some of classical music’s greatest. Call it Classical Hip-Hop, give it an exclusive MTV channel, and you’ve got yourself a revolution.
