Is it Creativity?In today's world, I believe that true originality is hard to find. Everything is a remake of something. Kirby Ferguson's video series called 'Everything is a Remix' helped me realize how 'most box office hits rely heavily on existing material'. In the video, Ferguson defines remix as "to combine or edit existing materials to produce something new". There are many examples of how the same bass line of a specific song has been used for several different songs. There are many movies that are adaptions and transformations of other existing material. In this post, I'm going to discuss how the movie "Star Wars" was combined and edited. First of all, Star Wars is inspired by Joseph Campbell's book "The Hero with a thousand faces". As mentioned in the video, it is also influenced by a lot of other movies such as The call to Adventure and Supernatural Aid. Many scenes in the movie are similar to other existing material from all over the world. There are many resemblances from other movies incorporated in Star Wars. The main point here is that without the existing scenes, shots and ideas from other movies, Star Wars would not have been present today. But the question is, Is that Creativity? Wasn't it copied? Well, I agree that Star Wars has many scenes resembling from other movies. Star Wars is a remix of other existing materials. Without copying, we cannot learn. It is through the process of copying that we learn to combine, adapt and transform. I believe that George Lucas, who produced Star Wars, did not copy exact ideas from other movies. He combined, edited, adapted and transformed other ideas to form his own version of a movie. Some light saber scenes from the movie, arm chop scene and others were combined and transformed from other scenes. Star Wars' credit list format at the end of the film is copied from the movie Flash Gordon. The resembling scenes from these movies in Star Wars cannot be categorized as 'copied' because the producer has given enough changes to create something new. The story line, setting, atmosphere, weather, angles, languages are all different from other movies, not making it an 'exact copy'. Ideas are hard to come up with these days, since so much time has passed. Creativity can originate from another existing material. That is exactly what I think about Star Wars. It is a very creative movie, combined, edited and transformed from other ideas. Although, I do think that credits should definitely be given when copying, combining and transforming. Otherwise, the origin of the idea will not receive much appreciation if it later becomes popular through a remix. Finally, to avoid ripping something off, make sure to transform a real idea a lot, enough to make it your own. Change as many aspects of it as possible to create a new element. Never forget to give credits to the sources you copied from. If you follow these guidelines, you can pretty much make sure that nothing's been 'ripped off'. Links to images and video references: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Star_Wars_Logo.svg/1280px-Star_Wars_Logo.svg.png https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HuenDPZw0 http://www.ufunk.net/en/musique/everything-is-a-remix-lhistoire-du-remix-en-7-minutes/
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AuthorI am Keziah Vilson from A.B. Lucas Secondary School. I write about topics we cover in my grade 12 English class. Archives
December 2016
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