Learning, Making, and Failing. Utterly Failing.

The assignment for my Master’s program in educational technology was simple: create a remix video about copyright practices according to legal copyright practices. Very meta. Since creating using visual tools and medium was a weakness of mine, I was apprehensive about making one. But, I thought my strengths in figuring out technology would balance things out.

I was wrong.

Let’s start with my successes: I fiddled for around for about an hour with the idea of using pop music (the handful of different songs titled “Express Yourself”) and using 30 second snippets of each, but I couldn’t figure out how to download music from Spotify or SoundCloud without breaking their terms of service, which would have been illegal based on copyright law. And by “download” I meant obtaining an mp3 of a song, not merely having the ability to listen offline. I considered purchasing individual tracks from Apple Music, but I decided to look into creative commons music. And, compared to what was available freely around five years ago, the tracks available now are higher quality, easier to find, and easier to download. I found tracks that I wanted to use on ccMixter and the Free Music Archive.

Two hours had gone by.

I had no concept of what videos I would use to stitch together my video on fair use. Do I take four other videos on fair use and simply use parts of each? No, that would be lame. I floundered for another hour looking at fair use videos before I gave up on that idea and finally watched another student’s video for ideas, which inspired me to write a simple outline and describe video scenes that would fit each section of fair use:

1. Materials must not be used for commercial purposes (education, research, critique, parody, were okay). Here I would use a video snippet of money. Lots of money. Like, printing presses of money.
2. Materials must not be used in whole, but rather a small part would be okay. Here I would find a video of a competitive eater; and then as a contrasting image, a video of a bird eating.
3. Meaning must be added to the material. ??? (Never figured this one out.)
4. The material must be transformed. Transformers!

Another, oh, hour and a half had gone by.

Now it was time to search for my videos. I tried Vimeo, but typing in search terms bounced me to non-creative commons content. I tried advanced Googling, but advance Googling wouldn’t allow me to do both a video search and restrict by creative commons licensing. I made my way over to the Prelinger Archives, and after about an hour of watching old videos, found a video of a U.S. mint making coins. But there were no videos on eating. So, I made my way to Youtube, and finally found a video of a guy explaining how to find creative commons videos on Youtube, and finally found some videos made by competitive eaters. But, then I couldn’t download them without breaking Youtube’s terms of service. Went back to Vimeo…and you get the idea.

Here’s a summary of the video finding issues I encountered:

1. In order to find specific snippets of video, I had to search for and watch video. Nobody describes what’s in the videos. I had to watch them to find out.
2. There was no guarantee that I could find a particular snippet I wanted.
3. When I did find one that was CC licensed, there was no guarantee that the owner of the video actually allowed downloads of it.
4. Using a 3rd-party video downloader was against terms and service of the video hosting websites in question.

Another two hours gone by. It was well past midnight, and I hadn’t even found videos yet, let alone stitch them together and write a blog post about it. Granted, I had not started until the day the assignment was due; but at least this week, I had finished all the readings beforehand.

I had to cut my losses. There was no way I could finish this assignment in a reasonable amount of time, even if I had started earlier. Maybe if I had found video snippets first, and then figured out how to make meaning out of them, instead of the other way around?

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Despite not making anything, I think I have a better understanding of what it takes to remix: it depends on the ability to see and take parts out of their original context and envision them in new contexts. There’s a certain type of visual creativity involved that is similar to DJ’ing or creating music mashups; a level of visual creativity that I apparently possess very very little of! Heck, I had trouble finding a frickin’ gif during a Zoom discussion at the beginning of the semester for another course. And, do not get me started on the infographic I made for the last unit. That, too, was extremely bad!

So, how much of my inability to work with visual media is an individual trait and how much is generational? Hard to say. I’m guessing it’s the combination of both that’s proven especially crippling for me during this assignment.

So, then, as an educator, how do I reflect on this? Is this type of project something I offer to my students? Or, do I avoid it like the plague?