Somewhere in the mists of time, when everyone was getting excited about Christina Aguilera’s come-hither vocals being brutally welded to the tinny guitars of some upstarts from New York called The Strokes, I had a conversation with a friend about the so-called ‘mash-up explosion’. It went something along the lines of: “This is good, yes. But it would be great if you could do it with films.” We sketched out a few ideas of how that might work, then did absolutely nothing, flummoxed by the technological hurdles in our path, and promptly forgot all about it.
Fortunately, others succeeded where we failed. The first one I saw, about a year ago, was a trailer for The Shining, recut as a romantic comedy. The result of a contest for assistant editors in New York, it was a simple idea, brilliantly executed and very funny – from “Here’s Johnny!” to “I’m your new foster father” with a few deft snips and a swathe of Peter Gabriel. Video-editing programmes such as Final Cut Pro are now relatively simple to obtain, as are computers powerful enough to run them. The arrival of these DIY video-editing suites unleashed the next big web artform – the ‘trailer-mash-up’. Brokeback To The Future stands proud as another high point of the genre – created by a comedy group in Boston, it refocused the Back To The Future trilogy as a tale of hidden homosexual love seen through Doc and Marty’s manly hugs and stolen glances.
These and about a billion others have all been archived at thetrailermash.com (www.thetrailermash.com). Popular areas include; riffing on the Brokeback Mountain theme (Star Wars: The Empire Brokeback), geek fantasies (Neo Vs Robocop), genre re-cuts (Groundhog Day The 13th, Must Love Jaws) and straight mash-ups (Chronicles Of Narnia Vs Land Of The Dead). Sequels are another attention-grabbing area, for example Robert Blankenheim’s mischievous Titanic Two: The Surface, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Jack is found frozen on the Titanic. He’s thawed and taken to New York, where he then goes on the run, created from scenes taken from a number of his other movies.
Normally when this kind of thing happens, you hear lots of huffing and puffing about copyright infringement. So, it’s good to see film-makers getting behind it and even going so far as to provide the raw materials, in the way that Darren and Clint have here. It makes sense. Today’s generation of filmgoers are becoming as accustomed to creating and uploading their own entertainment as they are to consuming it in the traditional manner. Sites like YouTube have made amateur broadcasters of almost everyone. People now expect to have their say, and – as the makers of Snakes On A Plane will attest – when something grabs the web community’s attention it can have massive creative and commercial impact. Against this backdrop of interactivity, films and other forms of entertainment that don’t make an effort to involve their audience appear increasingly two-dimensional and old-fashioned.
Already, some remixes of The Fountain theme have come in that are worth a listen, with Matt Wells’ crunchy cut-up my personal favourite. As for the trailers, Keegan Martin’s visual edit is the strongest for me at the moment. But so far most of the edits and mixes have been pretty reverential with the source material. It’s of a high standard but I’m sure Darren and Clint wouldn’t be offended if you had more fun with it. Take some risks, try something new and go for the unexpected. Although you might want to leave that copy of Brokeback Mountain alone.
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