Mashup

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A video mashup (also written as video mash-up) is the combination of multiple sources of video—which usually have no relevance with each other—into a derivative work, often lampooning its component sources or another text. Many mashup videos are humorous movie trailer parodies^[1]. They are one of the latest genre of mashups, and are gaining popularity. To the extent that such works are 'transformative' of original content, they may find protection from copyright claims under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law.^[2]

History

First there were music mashups, where multiple tracks are combined, often with one a cappella track by one artist over a second backing track by another.

The same principle is then brought to the Web 2.0 world, in the form of software mashups in which two or more sets of data are combined over the Internet to create a new entity. An example is overlaying houses for sale over a Google Map.

More recently, the video mashup has come of age thanks to the likes of video-uploading sites like YouTube. Various YouTube members use videos such as trailers, cartoons, movies, and even gameplay footage to create a remix by using various video/audio-trimming techniques. These video mashups (often called "YouTube Poop"^[3]) gain their popularity by the emerging of the Web 2.0 model which provides simplification in acquiring the source materials and for distributing the derivative videos^[4], where user-generated digital video seen on sites such as Google Video and YouTube provides a large pool of digital video content source which can be used as base works for new mixes and remixes. To date, many of these video mashups have been parodies, but even music mashups are being integrated to make combined audio-visual mashups. (Examples of video mashups can be seen at the external links section.)

Styles

Mashup films can be broken down into several predominant styles and tropes. Most of the Mashups found on the internet fall into one category and more or less obey the unwritten rules of that class of film. These categories, are: word associated mashups, which like DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album unite two disparate source materials by a pun or joke found in the name; transgressive mashups which transgress the sexual norms put forth in a film, often subverting hetero-normative portrayals; and overdubbing mashups, which use the images from a film and replaces the soundtrack with new dialogue or dialogue from another work, which undermines the original narrative. This style incorporates many lines from television shows and internet memes.^{[citation needed]}

Word association genre

Mashups based on word associations speak more than just for the wit of the appropriator. In principle, these mashups, when executed well, express some of the central creative tenets of modern found footage filmmaking:

1. Narrative film consistently follows the same filmic grammar and rarely diverts from it, making it easy to unify disparate films because of their similarities;
2. The formulas inherent in narrative film are so well known by audiences that a few stylistic cues (which have been imitated to the point of cliché) can easily alert an audience to the nature of what they are watching.

Using these two principles, mashups are highly successful at parodying more than just the films they chose to amalgamate, but also at critiquing and revealing the tools of narrative filmmaking.^{[citation needed]}

Examples

• Some exceptional word associated mashups include "Must Love Jaws", a combination of the romantic comedy Must Love Dogs and Jaws in which music cues and humorous scenes turn visual source material from Jaws into a story about a man who falls in love with a shark.
• 8½ Mile is a mashup of Federico Fellini's film 8 1/2 and Curtis Hanson's 8 Mile.
• One of the best received mashups to date is word-associated: "10 Things I Hate About Commandments", from 10 Things I Hate About You and The Ten Commandments.^{[citation needed]}
• BrokeBack to the Future: A mashup of Brokeback Mountain and the Back to the Future trilogy, in which Doc Brown and Marty McFly are lovers.
• Snatch Wars: George Lucas' Star Wars and Guy Ritchie's Snatch collide to create the character Darth Vader - a foul-mouthed, forever-angry cyborg who calls everyone Errol and dishes out dead-body disposal tips to anyone who will listen.

See also

• Re-cut trailer
• Video remix
• Video editing

External links

• Interactive Music Video Mashup Charts

References

1. ^ Steps in Making a Video Mashup
2. ^ Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, American University, Center for Social Media
3. ^ http://youtube.wikia.com/wiki/YouTube_Poop
4. ^ What Video Mashup is?