furtherandfaster: easter

I'll spare you the sermon. But if you were interested I had the idea ages ago of mashing an easter film to the sound track of the song Get this party started. There are 2 versions because I couldn't make up my mind between the Rhydian Xfactor version (which he hasn't recorded commercially) and Shirley Bassey's take which became famous as the soundtrack to the M&S Christmas ad a couple of years ago. The final result isn't the film I would want to have made which would have been a lot less literal (Jesus/life of Brian movie material) and more lateral - clips of celebration but I had to consider my audience (sorry congregation).

The exercise was also noteworthy for me because it was the first time I had successfully ripped vids off youtube - clipped and trimmed and bunged them back. Tip'o the hat to www.zamzar.com. This is a whole new way of mashing up content and expressing oneself using film. And once I had the footage and soundtracks ripped it took perhaps an hour per film to assemble. If you have a flash video encoder then I recommend it. It reduced a 900MB AVI file to around 20MB much quicker to upload back to youtube.

For those troubled by the copyright implications well I'm not. I bought the Shirley Bassey album and ripped the mp3 of the track off that. If Rhydian had recorded the track then I would have bought it - but I had to take it off youtube as an mp3. As for the Jesus clips they were already on youtube in the public domain. And I haven't put my mashups up for sale.

Next step - organise a teaching night so I can get a whole clutch of people ripping and mashing. Then on to full DVD ripping - film making has got to become as liquid as audio currently is.