Viral “I Gotta Feeling” Black Eyed Peas video and Ken Burns series are hot!
Here’s a well-choreographed fun video you gotta see. A one-take music video to the tune “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas. The camera begins outside a building on the University Montreal Quebec’s campus, and then travels through out the building, hovering down hallways, peeking into classrooms, gliding up stairs and down, finally finishing in the TV/film department’s studio… with more than 170 students performing and lip-syncing… all in just one take.
The students planned this for a month, and performers had one week to learn the song, and just hours for a run through. They had 2 rehearsals, and shot two tries, the second clip being done in just one take. And you thought university students only studied math and science. You gotta see “I Gotta Feeling”.
For a different take on the extreme end of movie/film/video producing, Ken Burn’s latest PBS series launched last night, and this time he didn’t have to rely on the pan-and-scan “Ken Burns Effect” to tell his story.
“The National Parks – America’s Best Idea” is a 12 hour series that took Burns and partner Dayton Duncan and their film crew all over the United States, filing from dawn to dusk and beyond, to capture the beauty of the national parks. This story is not just of the people who assured these national parks would stay public, but it also offers up some incredible time-lapse footage of places in the parks that you might not ever know existed.
At one time I lived near the entrance to Yosemite, and never tired of finding something new about the majestic waterfalls and rock formations. 
From well-known parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone to extremely remote areas in Alaska and Hawaii, Burns’ images make you feel like you’re there, and any video producer who strives to make documentaries should check out this series.
Ken Burns is the master of story-telling, it’s no surprise that Reel Screen magazine called Burns “one of the most influential documentary makers of all time”.
University Montreal – Quebec’s music video and Ken Burns’ new series, two movies, extremely differnt, both are worth watching!
September 28th, 2009 at 8:49 am
The Black Eyed Peas video the students created is one of those things that, as an audio/visual educator at a school, always throws me for a loop. I see it drilled into educators all over the place to respect copyright and I try to instruct my students to respect copyright as well. (Although I also make sure they are just as well educated in fair use.)
But then I see this kind of video created, at a school no less, and it’s touted all over as this “amazing video” and, “Wow, you should see this!” And nowhere do I see any mention of copyright problems? Did they get permission to use the song? Do they need permission? Am I missing something? Posting on YouTube is considered “global distribution” of your work, so the argument that they “just made it for friends” wouldn’t hold up.
You hear about some mom getting sued by the record labels because a song could be heard in the /background/ of a YouTube video of her toddler dancing/bouncing around the kitchen. Yet here is an entire music video created using an actual soundtrack from the original music and nobody is saying anything.
It’s very frustrating because there are many, many projects my student would /love/ to do and would be amazingly creative, but they would involve copyrighted music, so they aren’t allowed. (Sure they could do it just for themselves, but posting their work on YouTube and so forth is the main reason they want to create the videos in the first place.)
Maybe this is a topic for this blog to pick up? I just find it frustrating because while I /love/ seeing this kind of creative work, it’s not something I can turn around and show my students because if they want to do something similar, they wouldn’t be allowed due to abuse of copyright.
September 28th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I certainly do agree with you, Dylan, I saw something recently about a 4 yr old rocking to “Juke Box Hero” and I thought it was cute but was surprised it hadn’t been taken down. Our Art Director did a nice little vacation piece recently where she included 10-seconds of a popular 80s-era song and got a pull-down from YouTube for using it. Does YT do the monitoring? Or does BMI or ASCAP find these and demand the pulldown? At Videomaker, we advocate following the rules and our “What’s Legal” column is quite popular, and it’s mostly about Fair Use and Copyright. It’s a confusing world.
September 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Oddly enough, minutes after posting my comment, I came across this article from the Official Google Blog in my Google Reader:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-insight-into-claimed-content-on.html
I have a feeling this is probably what’s happening, since when you watch the video you linked in the article, you get ads for that Black Eyed Peas song to buy as a ringtone. My guess is the record label saw the video that the students did and opted for the “make money” Content ID option rather than the “block” option.
That still throws things into the grey zone though. Do you make the video, post it to YouTube, hope it gets popular enough that the record label chooses the “make money” option instead of the “block”/sue option? While it’s a nice option for YouTube to provide for people whose content is being used incorrectly, it unfortunately doesn’t help the people using the content to know beforehand what will happen with their video.
September 29th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
This is something we’ve been discussing, too. We shared a story awhile back about an 80s era song getting re-visited by thousands after a wedding bridal party danced to it while going down the aisle. The original band opted for it to stay as it was bringing them income. The same with a few original songs where the songwriter wasn’t able to get a record deal, so posted on YouTube and the popularity of the number of hits caught some music producers eye and B-I-N-G-O… recording contract. The rules are becoming more and more gray, and nothing is absolute anymore.
September 29th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
oh, yeah.. THAT dance. The JK Wedding Entrance Dance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0