UMV's and Memes.

UMV'S are unofficial music videos, produced with a range of motivations, including the subversion of copyright laws , countercultural politics, paying tribute or sometimes just because we like to be creative and have the technology to do so. Popular types of UMV use items like Lego, Playdo, pictures with the songs lyrics across the video or the Japanese animations; Anime. These sub genres of UMV'S have formed the broad category of fan media which describes any remixed, edited piece of media content where a fan of a commercial media product has put there own spin on the material and shared it over the internet.


The people who make and follow these videos, nicknamed "UMV-ers" obviously no longer want MTV and now crave the time, talent and freedom to re-make music and video, blur genres, contradict pop meanings and revitilise what has become a slowly dying, ever greedy, talent-lacking industry. It is because of this that our music video has to portray the right message and fit in the correct genre.


With this is mind, it leads on to another type of online video sharing; Memes.
Memes are videos, pictures, thoughts, stories, practically anything that spreads on the internet quickly from person to person. Some examples ...

Numa Numa Guy    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmtzQCSh6xk

Blood       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fVDGu82FeQ

3 year old monsters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk-1mla0LeU

Baby laughing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4abiHdQpc

Boy wrecks stone wall  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHT5VkQ2Ng8


Although the above examples are all memes, there are 2 classic memes that were made extremely big and in both cases went on to provoke others to produce their own copies of the originals..
Charlie Bit Me! was made so popular by the sheer innocence of the babies. The brothers are playing together when brother harry decides to put his finger into baby charlie's mouth and is surprised that he gets bitten! This meme had 2.6 million hits at the start of feb 2006. Below are some examples of how this video was remixed, manipulated and copied whilst leaving harry and charlie with their own brand and blog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he5fpsmH_2g

This was then taken by a fan to produce this..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOle1AnPOc4&feature=related
which was then taken to produce this..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAxgA7N1BFE&feature=related
and together they all formed new media, t-shirts, jokes, and novelty items..

The second classic meme example is "Gingers have souls". The video was made and uploaded by a young student ranting about the abuse he recieves for having ginger hair and his disagreement with South parks ginger jokes. Throughout the video, the boy becomes increasingly angry, shouting at the camera that he himself was holding. The video was so popular it was copied to the extent of South park actually including him in one of their cartoons! therefore the whole reason for creating the video was lost.

Here is the orginal..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY39fkmqKBM

Which was taken to produce this..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1MBUeZZlcs&feature=related

To which South park themselves made this..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7FwXPz8Slc&feature=related

Which lead to the production of these...



Websites like http://www.squidoo.com/top-10-internet-memes and http://www.knowyourmeme.com were made especially to present prosumers videos and it is sites like these (plus youtube) were amateur videos like ours would get publicized and shared.

Both "Charlie bit me" and "Gingers have souls" can be descibed as a form of hyperreality where images refer to eachother. Many more media examples set out to explore and play with this hyperreality including Avatar, Matrix, Blade runner, Dj shadows music and the Cadbury gorilla advert.



By understanding UMV's and Memes it gave us an insight that not all videos have to come from MTV or AKA, and that music videos like the one we would be producing can be just as successful as the real celebrity artist ones, and when shared can get viewed by audiences all over the world and be hits within minutes.