Tomorrow in SF: “RiP: A Remix Manifesto” screening + Eclectic Method dance party

Eric Steuer, July 22nd, 2009

If you’ll be in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow night (Thursday, July 23), please join us for a screening of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, the acclaimed new documentary about remix culture, copyright, Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil, Cory Doctorow, and others. The film (released under a Creative Commons BY-NC license) is being presented by the San Francisco Film Society at Mezzanine (444 Jessie St.); doors open at 7pm and the screening begins at 7:30. RiP’s director, Brett Gaylor, will be in attendance to discuss the film and take questions. Members of the CC staff will be there too – please come by and say hi.

After the screening, DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D from Bootie SF will get the second part of the night – a dance party! – started with a live set of their awesome remixes and mash-ups. They’ll be followed by the incredible VJ crew Eclectic Method, who will rock the house with a live video remix set incorporating samples from movies, television, video games, found footage, and all kinds of visual randomness.

The event is open to people 21 years of age and older. Tickets (available here) are $12 for SFFS members and $17 for non-members. More information is available on the San Francisco Film Society’s website.

2008 Sparky Award Winners

Jane Park, February 3rd, 2009

The winners of last year’s Sparky Awards are now officially up online (see today’s press release). The Sparky Awards is “a contest organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and adopted by campuses nationwide that calls on entrants to creatively illustrate in a short video the value of sharing ideas.” The student winners were announced on January 24th in a public screening in Denver. The theme for 2008 was “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing”, and all four winning teams’ videos do a great job of expressing this value in the internet age via online videos, all CC licensed.

My personal favorite, and the grand prize winner, is:

“To Infinity and Beyond”
by Danaya Panya, Sebastian Rivera, Hemanth Sirandas, Uriel Rotstein, and Jaymeni Patel, University of Illinois at Chicago Honors College

Coincidentally, or fittingly, the winning video was the only video licensed under the attribution-only license (CC BY), the most open license encouraged for open educational resources (since you can remix it with most anything as long as you credit the original creators—what the Sparky Awards are all about!). “To Infinity and Beyond” also had the most student collaborators, demonstrating the value of teamwork and collaboration—an integral component of effective information sharing.

The first and second runners up are also very compelling (and dare I say funny). Licensed CC BY-NC-SA, they are available for you to remix with similarly licensed works:
How to Make Things Easier by Taejin Kim, Savannah College of Art and Design (CC BY-NC-SA)
Brighter by Christopher Wetzel, Ohio Northern University (CC BY NC-SA)

The fourth video, GrowUp, received the Special Merit Award and is licensed CC BY-NC-ND (ironically, you can’t mash this one up!) by Cécile Iran, Laurie Glassmann, Christophe Zidler, and Aldric de Villartay (University of Versailles-Saint Quentin, France)

Do check them all out on your lunch breaks; they are only two minutes or less! Perfect for internet age attention spans.

2008 Sparky Video Contest: “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing”

Jane Park, May 9th, 2008

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), along with other sponsors, is organizing the second annual Sparky Awards, “a contest that recognizes the best new short videos on the value of sharing and aims to broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research by inviting students to express their views creatively.”

Last year’s winners were announced earlier this year; the winners and runners up were all university students. Though this contest is ideal for college students with time on their hands, anyone can enter, as long as the video is:

• two minutes or less
• completed between January 1 and November 30, 2008
• narrated or subtitled in English
• publicly available on the internet on a web site or digital repository
• open for use under one of several Creative Commons licenses (details here)