Re-mixing Open Source Movies

Last week I went to an incredibly cool breakfast and networking event put on by NY:MIEG (New York: Media Information Exchange Group). In the process of researching all the speakers prior to the event, I went to Dina Kaplan’s blip.tv website to find out more about her company before the event and found a few cool video podcast shows I hadn’t seen before.

One of them was Rob Parrish’s “Next To Heaven” series These are these surreal videos which cleverly uses open source old movie footage, re-edited (sometimes called re-mixed) into strange surreal films, usually quite dark.

That made me curious to see if there are places online to find these usually hilarious old educational/newsreel films. I did some research and the most extensive and interesting website I found was Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive. Not all of the films are truly open source in the sense you can edit them and then distribute, so be sure to check the links to the creative commons licenses.

There are some interesting old footage to be found, whether you’re looking for atom bomb explosion, whistling grandmas, kids pullling the shoes off Daddy as he reads the paper, a baby crawling race or just simple wholesome reminders of how to live every aspect of your 1950’s life.

(Some charming images from old footage downloaded from Moving Image Archive).