Meck "Feels Like Home" Dir????
Spike Jonze rip off! Here's the original...
Not cool, Meck.
Not cool at all. It's a shame because most people who see it won't know the Jonze one exists, so the director gets undeserved credit for duping people. Shame on the commissioner too...
Yeah... if you're going to rip something off, probably check first that it hasn't had a million hits on Youtube.
Really great compositing.
Not that I want to beat a dead horse (sounds of thwacking in the background) but ...
I find it ironic that antvilleans seem way more upset that someone ripped off an idea for a single Spike skateboard video than are at all perturbed that people steal music and undercut the very industry that generates the work this whole site is about.
I assume it is just me.
so ALL your music is paid for, eh, 30f? I posted this thread solely because some dick director took someone else's idea (nothing to do with it being Mr Jonze, could have been ANY director) and blatently copied it. Not 'homage'....flat out copied it and will probably even fool people into thinking it was HIS idea. Now THAT sucks big-time....
wooosh - sound of the point flying right past
point was taken, mate. If I want to comment on stealing music, I'll go to the other thread and do so...click -sound of me logging off
notice, 30, how boiling everything down to one (mis-)nomer - "stealing" - doesn't really engender useful discourse?
yeah, I am a boring myself at this point.
Yeah, but did Jonze have them goto some guys house and then skate in an empty pool?
normally I like reading 30f's posts and writing, but the major logic flaw here is comparing two dissimilar types of intellectual property. When users download music they didn't buy, no one is passing off the music as their own creation. This same type of battle starts flying around in music when someone bites a guitar riff or lyric without it being 'reference' or 'homage', that's where the intellectual theft occurs – not commercial theft like downloading. Like scooper, I think that discussion is best served elsewhere. And meanwhile this video totally sucks. The director purposefully sets up waist-high shots or skating behind cars to lessen the number of fx shots. Wank.
I don't think this "sucks". In fact it gets a little tired to speak of a director that "ripped off" spike (or anyone else) simply to front an idea as his/her own. It's the mouth of jealousy talking there and is ultimately untrue and naive. Progosk posted a link to 30f's most recent unsubstantiated rant that 30f himself couldn't finish:
Lethem is getting at something really charged here that supercedes the instant castration the ville gives to anything that even postures toward another's work.
Is it not obvious that this piece is a love letter to Jonze and his 'Invisible skateboards'? I say absolutely!
Ripoff (if we were to speak in such terms) is that capri sun commercial of little kids going "rad" as they sip a fruit juice on invisible boards. That seems less acceptable for its appropriation of an idea to better push a corporate product into mass appeal. This is slightly different than a piece that showcases round the clock skaters cruising the invisible. One is using an idea for financial reasons under the guise of corporate "rad'. The other comes across more as an appreciation for both the sport and the effect's respective origin. The echo itself is appreciated. Never once does it even suggest sole propreitorship. Nor does it 'cop' said effect in such a way to undermine it's original use.
Okay, I am not so bored again, but chances are you will be by the end of this.
I will start again and maybe I can do a better job of making my point. My post in this thread was not really about equating two kinds “stealing” but rather about the classic ‘Villean reactions to the two things.
I am way less bothered by this bastard child inviso-skate thing than some are. Who cares? This guy's reel is prolly building towards a clattering silence anyway. The "theft" of the idea was not my point at all.
I was commenting about the way that someone treading near/on the work of one of the patron saints of MV seemed to spin some folks out while something that seems much, much bigger (at least to me) elicits shrugs.
You may not agree with my rhetorical position that illegal downloading is “stealing” – but it is hard for me to imagine anyone reading this not being able to see how the long-arm of downloaders has reached into the budgets (and profits) of music video directors. If you don’t see THAT, I dunno, pretend the rest of this is about some kind of top ten list of claymation figures that use yarn instruments to battle cardboard stop-motion anime robots.
So getting worked up about some minor director (meck) biting a thing that was not even a music video in the first place generates some serious shock while this tectonic shift in the industry (and not to the better, IMO) is not a big deal? That "whatever" reaction is a bit crazy to me, but also classic Antville.
Stand-up comics looove to go on and on about who’s a joke-stealer and all that. It is like a Jihad for them. Comics see stolen material everywhere. This situation with meck is stand-uppers railing against some dude stealing a small joke in one half-full college bar while, at the same time, major comedy club chains are closing up and the ones that remain are cutting the pay for comics in half AND the Tonight Show and Letterman BOTH announce they will no longer book stand-ups. As an outsider, I would think the comics bugging out over the measly stolen joke were missing the forest for the trees while their gigs and chances for advancement dry up.
Maybe folks feel like there is nothing to be done about the “big” issue and beating the offender in the “smaller” problem like a misfit in ‘Lord of the Flies’ is imminently more accomplishable. I guess I understand that. Some of you are tired of reading me going on about this issue, which is understandable. I don’t wanna be the Al Gore (or Chicken Little) of this situation, but I seem to keep checking that box on the menu, don’t I?
I believe that if the music industry doesn’t solve the theft problem (and that starts by recognizing it IS theft and not some more palatable euphemism) – then there will be less and less money in music and therefore music videos. Maybe some here are so edgy/underground/young that they are okay with the “amateurizing” of this once professionally shameful and diligently orgiastic industry – but I am not. If things keep shrinking, then meck and his reel might be high-class after all.
all that and not a single, self-promoting link, where's my medal?
"It's the mouth of jealousy talking there and is ultimately untrue and naive."- Lusk 81.
Pathetic assumption, mate. Jealousy is the last emotion I feel towards this piece. Jesus, you write like YOU directed it.
"Is it not obvious that this piece is a love letter to Jonze and his 'Invisible skateboards'? I say absolutely!"- Lusk81
Love letter, my arse. Ha, now THAT's naive...
Like I said, really great compositing.
I'm getting really tired of posts where the first five comments are issued like police warrants. We get it, people use other people's ideas. And yes, some ideas are cliche, and some ideas are rehashed versions of something else, and sometimes somebody goes and does a really bad emo video.
It's not that artistic integrity isn't important, but it is starting to feel a little silly to tear apart some tiny Meck video that'll probably never even see the light of day (even though somebody obviously spent some serious time on it). At this point, I'd welcome a derivative video or a rip-off, as long as it looked like they'd 1) spent the proper amount of time and money on it and 2) they actually pulled it off. I mean c'mon, Panic At The Disco got the best video nod at the MTV awards last year, the bar is pretty low at the moment. Are we really going to get all huffy about some tiny video that actually came out looking pretty good?
(continuing this back over at the originating post...)
It's a British director with the charmingly evocative moniker MANNY.
Basically heres what happened to my knowledge...the artist Meck is one dude...named Craig I think. Craig was looking through youtube for ideas for his video (no shit), and found a couple things he liked. When he saw the invisible skatebaords clip he called his friend Manny and said "that's it innit" or some such. Manny assured him they could do it, despite the total absence of motion control money in the budget. At some point prior to the shoot someone suggested he watch "Wassup Rockers" and there you go.
The level of responsibiltity a director has in regards to "borrowing" well known ideas or not at his artists request is a great discussion piece. It certainly gives me a strange feeling to watch this. I think the fx work actually came out really well for the money, though Wyeth's observations about shot choices are very well observed.
This is just too derivative for me, and the issue is in my mind not the illusionary gold plated integrity of a Spike Jonze idea and the brashness of stealing it for a little video, but more the sense that nothing new has been added. Taking an idea and doing a scaled down version of it is always a loss, unless of course its to an extreme and thats the gimmick.
Simply put; if one is going to stand on the shoulders of proverbial giants, you would hope the view to be more expansive.
"autenticity" in pop - a critique.
