Hacking Into Encom With The Glitch Mob

Super late to my own party on this, but here it is:

Last summer, I came up with an idea for The Glitch Mob to do a Tron: Legacy remix video scored to music from their 2010 album, Drink the Sea, and edited by Khameleon808. We released the video in November 2010 and after that lots of things happened.

Sean Bailey, the head of production at Disney, singled the video out at a press conference. It got a writeup on Wired.com, earning me a lovely compliment along the way for instigating this whole thing. And then, in February, The Glitch Mob were asked to do an official track for Disney’s Tron:Legacy R3configur3d remix album, featuring artists like M83, Photek, Moby, Com Truise, and others reworking Daft Punk’s original tracks from the movie score. R3configur3d just dropped last week and The Glitch Mob’s take on Daft Punk’s “Derezzed” is the first track on the album.

To celebrate the release, Khameleon808 re-teamed with the Glitch Mob to create another audio-visual-gasm.

Enjoy!


    



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Announcing: MirrorLAnd!

In addition to writing here at Social-Creature, I’ve been working on a fiction project, and am excited to announce it is finally ready to launch! (Click the image below to go to the website…)

MirrorLAnd is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, except Alice is now in her 20s, just out of college, and falling down the rabbit-hole working as an assistant in the film industry. Until she lands in the wonderland of LA’s underground circus. Plus, there’s free music, and lots of fashion and art. This is a project I’ve been working on for years and am thrilled to finally share it with you!

Get to MirrorLAnd….

    



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The Top 5 Social Creature Posts Of 2010

If you’re just joining us, here’s the top 5 things that happened here this year:

1. Why Iron Man Is The First 21st Century Superhero
For the past 70 years we have been living with a 20th century version of the superhero. Until now. Though the Iron Man character was originally created in the early 60s, his most recent incarnation is really the first Millennial superhero. (Then Jon Favreau, the director of Iron Man, retweeted it!! Craziness!)

2. The First 21st Century Vampires
Just as the new Iron Man has broken the mould constricting the superhero archetype, True Blood’s vampires offer a compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman relationship to it. (MetaFilter gave it love, too.)

3. How The Internet Killed The Rock Star (…Not The Way You Think)
At this point, to say the Internet’s done away with anything else when it comes to music is, admittedly, a cliché, but, nevertheless, there’s one more, less-publicized casualty: the rock star. Zoe Keating agreed.

4. Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience
“Transmedia” has become the new buzzword for multi-platform narratives, but in the digital age, transmedia isn’t just how we consume entertainment narratives, it’s how we experience the narrative of our lives. This post later became the basis for a panel with me, Marta Kagan, and Jan Libby, at the FutureM conference in Boston.

5. How To Stand In the Face of Powerlessness For A New Generation
As a generation, mine has not known powerlessness. We’ve had so little practice at facing situations where we couldn’t just do something; at fighting them, at living through them. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is my generation’s unfortunate turn to figure out how to stand in the face of powerlessness.

Honorable mention:

The Glitch Mob Drops The New-Tron Bomb
This happened so late in the year that it didn’t quite have time to catch up, but my idea for a Tron:Legacy remix video scored to The Glitch Mob’s music and edited by Khameleon808 is still the 7th most popular thing that happened on Social-Creature in 2010. (It even got into Wired.com.)

Ps. Thanks to Boston Innovation for naming me one of “Five Fresh Faces Leading Boston’s Creative Revolution.” Though I seem to be splitting my time between Boston and LA the past couple of years, (I wish Facebook would let you put “It’s complicated” under “Current city”), it is, of course, an honor to play even a little part in any Boston-based revolution.

See you next year!!

    



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today’s awesome ad (mashup) award goes to

Ad #2 (but watch them in order).


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UPDATE:

On December 1st, I received an email from a reader, Dave Clooney, pointing to an NBC Sports article which uncovers the truth about the Jordan ad:

Sorry, it’s a spoof. Someone has taken an old Jordan Nike commercial, “Maybe You Should Rise,” and mashed it with LeBron’s “What Should I Do?”, with pretty good results. But Sun-Sentinel Miami Heat beat reporter Ira Winderman confirms that it’s a forgery in this tweet.

Here’s the original Jordan Nike commercial:

Still, the mashup was so good that it fooled a lot of people. Others just threw it up there without checking. But as Winderman points out, there’s no way Nike is going to undermine its own efforts by letting one of its superstar endorser take a shot at another.

Reminds me of the awesome billboard mashup trend I’d been noticing before:

mashup

mashup

    



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The Glitch Mob Drops The New-Tron Bomb

rerezzed

Back in the spring, when I was writing a post about Why Iron Man is The First 21st Century Superhero, I came across this awesome Iron Man trailer remix created by Mike Relm. The remix was so rad, in fact, that when Jon Favreau, the director of Iron Man, brought it to the attention of Paramount and Marvel, they hired Relm to do an official TV spot for the film in his signature style.

Some months later, I saw a beyond-epic 9-minute long video, called “The Apple Tree,” featuring VFX shots, action clips, and dance sequences from like 700 different movies in a mind-scrambling montage scored to The Glitch Mob‘s music. New York Magazine, which got a hold of the video in September, called it “intense,” and, indeed, if by the end of The Apple Tree you don’t experience the overwhelming need to get in your car and drive somewhere immediately with the volume up, the windows down, and the needle in the red the whole way, you’re probably dead. The first time I watched it I literally had to hit pause like every 30 seconds just to catch my breath. But more than simply an adrenalized ad for special effects, The Apple Tree video is really a piece of art, using montage not so much to tell a story but rather to relate sound to motion, each cut creating its own blast of synesthesia. Among the clips used in the video were a handful from the forthcoming Tron: Legacy sequel due out in December, which picks up where the classic 1982 movie left off.

And that’s when I got an idea… I brought this idea to The Glitch Mob, who got Khameleon808, the auteur behind the Apple Tree on board; we picked a track, Animus Vox, off their new album, Drink The Sea, and now, a few months later, I’m suuuuuper excited to announce this new piece of total fucking awesome!

Brace yourselves!

Khameleon808’s Tron: Legacy “REREZZED”
ft. music by The Glitch Mob

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UPDATE:

On November 23rd, Wired.com picked up the video, in an article titled “Fan’s ‘Rerezzed’ Mashup Earns Raves From Tron: Legacy Producer”:

A Tron mashup crafted by an unemployed movie fan made a big impression on Tron: Legacy producer Sean Bailey, who singled out the clip during a recent Los Angeles press conference.

While discussing Tron: Legacy’s viral-marketing campaign, Bailey saluted the trailer made by 31-year-old Josh Prescott. The DIY filmmaker took Daft Punk’s electronica as a stylistic point of departure for his own sequence of beauty shots culled from promotional trailers and music videos for the 3-D sci-fi sequel.

Prescott’s “Rerezzed” clip, which glides along on music by Los Angeles-based trio The Glitch Mob, caught the eye of Bailey and other Tron: Legacy filmmakers.

On November 24th, the video was featured on the official Tron: Legacy Facebook page, and Twitter account.

At the time of this update the video has been viewed over 85,000 times.

For my crimes in originating the idea for the video, Wired.com called me a “social media maven.”

Congrats to all those involved, Khameleon808 and The Glitch Mob!

UPDATE 2:

March 2, 2011 – The cat is out of the bag: Pitchfork reports Walt Disney Records will release a remix album of the Tron:Legacy soundtrack, Tron: Legacy R3CONFIGUR3D on April 5th. The first track on there is The Glitch Mob’s remix of “Derezzed.” In case you’re wondering what that’s gonna be like, I’ve heard it, and it sounds like what this looks like:

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