RETROMANIA New life on Mars for 1973 Bowie promo

Student videos often tap into the possibility of promo campaigns targeting a new, younger audience. Some of the re-formed Pixies videos, such as Bagboy, are a good example of this approach in practice by established artists.

Bowie is not the first to get either a new video (there have been several posthumous videos for Elvis, Biggie, Tupac and more, not to mention the hologram live appearances by Ronnie Dio, Michael Jackson and more) or a re-edit, but the news that a 1973 promo clip is being revisited by its director and editor could inspire more such work.

This could offer buying incentives to repackaged best of albums, and at minimum is a cheap means of gaining free media publicity through media coverage. Video plays are monetised, even if the payment levels are controversially low per online view, and video collections remain a useful means of monetising through DVD sales (eg, I've pre-ordered a new Depeche Mode DVD collecting their video work, a November release that should sell well in the gap between album releases and tours).

Watch the reworked video for David Bowie's Life on Mars.

POMO RETROMANIA Shot-by-shot remake videos

This vaguely creepy effort by a US presenter has added a useful 1m hits to Selena Gomez' hit single. BELOW I consider examples where a different (new) track is used with a remake of an old video. There is an embedded playlist at the bottom of this post.

NB: There is some swearing from 2:38 in the video below.

More evidence that music video is the ultimate postmodern, intertextual format, the magpie medium that steals the nest eggs of previous videos and just about every audio-visual format going: the shot by shot remake videos.

The article that drew my attention to this doesn't mention an earlier filmic example of this strange phenomenon: Gus Van Sant's utterly dreadful Psycho remake (1960; 1998), adding colour and some jarring diegetic sound as the woefully miscast, towering Vince Vaughn uses his peephole. (See Wiki; trailer; FeudNation's often crude comparison flags up many of the problems using multiple clips from both) That was seen as a terribly arty effort by an auteur filmmaker - many of the music video equivalents share the element of tribute, but are much more playful and consciously postmodern.

There's only two One Directions

Edited within an impressively tight timeframe, here are the two edits of the IGSMedia remake/pastiche of the 1D hit One Thing - the original video is embedded within an earlier post.

Enjoyed these? Why not try the Britney remake, and sample a wide range of other videos at the IGSMediaStudies YouTube channel!!!

2013 Remake Challenge: 1D's One Thing

My ears look forward to this as much as a sharp stick being poked through them, but here we go with a 2013 vid remake challenge. Students pitched a multitude of interesting ideas, from Rebecca Black's advert for earplugs, Friday, to Olivia Newton-John's Grease, but a consensus was reached around this aural atrocity...

Not sure how the open-top bus will be managed (a matchbox toy? car-trailer? cardboard cutout?), and I've a sinking feeling I've figured out who 'Zayn' is and why there was an optimistic call for yours truly to play him, but we start with meticulous denotation of the original.
It helps to have UGC/fan-made vids like this:

It also helps that YouTube have signed deals with most of the major labels (and many Indies) to ensure such vids can be exhibited through their site!
We'll carry out meticulous denotation using note sheets like those pictured below.