Remix the Undead

In the spirit of Halloween, FreeCulture has a remix contest to literally raise the (video) dead:

What the hell?
Ever wanted to bring something back from the dead? Well, you still can't revive old Fido, but you can bring dead art back to life! Most art doesn't make it into the history books – in fact, it's often seen by only a handful of people before it vanishes into dusty oblivion. [More]

But now, thanks to a growing movement to use Creative Commons licensing and the public domain to keep art available and reusable, it's possible to breathe new life into art that would otherwise be forgotten. Best of all, it's legal!

How the hell?
We're running a supernatural remixing contest and we need your help. Here's how it works:

Step 1: Raise the Dead. Get out your video editing tools and download a slice of George A. Romero's classic 1968 horror flick Night of the Living Dead. Romero's original, idiosyncratic, super-low-budget vision of a broken world filled with animated, cannibalistic corpses has filled the imaginations of moviegoers for decades. Indeed, it's the film that gave birth to an entire genre: the apocalyptic zombie horror movie. [More]

And because it's in the public domain, anyone can borrow pieces of it to make a music video, comic short, or other art. Which is what we want you to do. To really get your creative juices flowing, hook yourself up with another piece of re-mixable art: the 2003 student film "Amid the Dead." [More]

It's available for download here for the first time, under a Creative Commons license that gives you permission to play mad scientist.

Step 2: Go Mad – Invent! Take a piece of Romero, mix it up with some Amid the Dead, and add your own special twist. Use your imagination to build your own new piece of art.

Step 3: Give it a ReBirth Certificate. Tag your new creation with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. It not only lets people feel safe to use your work without having to phone you and a team of lawyers, but it prevents someone else getting their own team of lawyers and turning your work into a big commercial franchise that everyone else has to pay to use.

Step 4: Set it Loose in Public. There are several ways to get your work to us:

Share it on a p2p network (make sure to put "[FC-Dead-Art]" in the file name!)
Burn it to a CD or DVD and snail-mail it to us.
Upload it to Archive.org.
Put it on your own webserver.
If you're a college student at a participating campus, you can hand-deliver your entry to your local chapter.
[More]
Step 5: Alert the Neighbors. Don't forget to tell us how to get a copy. We'll be tracking all of the pieces of art created during this campaign, and starting on Halloween we'll be spotlighting entries. If you walk away with the top prize, you'll get a (lifeless) candy-filled zombie piñata and a brand-spanking new copy of Night of the Living Dead on DVD! The two runners-up will also receive copies of Night of the Living Dead on DVD.

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Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and publisher of Blogcritics.org, which, quite frankly, rules - as do his wife and four children.

Visit Eric Olsen's author page — Eric Olsen's Blog