Jessica Svendsen

Everything is a Remix is a four-part video series on covers, sampling, remixing, and copying across a number of platforms. The first video is about cover songs (Led Zeppelin in particular), the third video is a brief history of computer copying (Xerox Parc, Macintosh, etc.), and the fourth video is on copyright, memes, and intellectual property.

I’ve included the second video in the series below, which is about direct homage and remixing in film. This video focuses on Star Wars and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, but the video above is an extensive documentation of all of the homages in Kill Bill. By showing the comparative footage, one sees how Tarantino’s films are just as much about the history of cinema and cross-referencing his own oeuvre, as they are independent works.

Portlandia makes me so happy. This may be their most spot-on video yet.

I saw David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been waiting for the title sequence to circulate ever since. Sequenced to Trent Reznor’s cover of Led Zeppelin, there is a stream of black liquid which engulfs and flows from various characters and symbols in the trilogy. According to Fincher, he wanted the title sequence to be Lisbeth’s nightmare: “We have references to the insane asylum, references to drowning. There’s a black liquid that swallows everything up, and in Freudian terms it’s sex and powerlessness. I also wanted to have some allusions to the tattoos. We wanted to have the dragon, and the phoenix. It was a great opportunity, a mélange of nightmarish imagery.”

The sequence was designed by Blur Studio—a surprise, considering Fincher’s long collaboration with Kyle Cooper of Prologue Films. Here’s an interview with Tim Miller of Blur Studio, which also features a few process animation videos.

For one week this summer, I read Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, and like millions of other readers, I was completely captivated by them. I rarely read bestsellers and I’ve never read a mystery before. But it was this impeccably-executed trailer for the upcoming film adaptation which made me read the trilogy. Directed by David Fincher (who is known for his superb trailers and title sequences), this teaser is arguably better than the full trailer: the sequence, the distressed (and huge) typography, all scored to a Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover of Led Zeppelin. All of this is to say, I am so freaking excited to see this film in two weeks.

Documentation of Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007.

Paintings by Michael Cina, followed by the beautiful 1958 experimental film by Polish director Mieczyslaw Waskowski, Somnambulists.

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Matt Mulder of Digital Kitchen came to the Yale School of Art a couple weeks ago for a week-long workshop in our motion design course. In a lecture, he showed some of his work at Digital Kitchen, including the fantastic video above for the 2010 World Cup. Digital Kitchen is well-known for their title sequence for the HBO series True Blood, featured below. I’ve also included a behind-the-scenes video, which shows how the team used different types of footage and hand-made typography to create the sequence. At the end of the video is the first edit, which depending on your taste, is on par with or better than the final version.