I have a film production company called Cabin 2 Productions (here is our youTube channel). My friend and I formed it back in 2001-ish and we have been making little films ever since. I made a couple in Taiwan and returned to Canada in 2008-9 to create a feature-length documentary, On The Line, to date my biggest undertaking (it took about two years from the start of filming to the final days of post).
I don’t plan to analyze that beast here. Instead I would like to focus on a film I created with a couple of close friends back in 2003 called 19NT Shirt. You can watch it here.
This is the promo poster found on youTube for our 2003 film, 19NT Shirt.
We made the film over the course of a few weeks, filming our travels up and down the island, getting into different kinds of trouble. We targeted all the stuff one wouldn’t see in the brochure as we visited betel nut girls, attended a music festival, and explored a wet market. All of the images we captured were ours although without anyone’s permission.
The part of the story that intersects with RiP! A Remix Manifesto by Brett Gaylor (here on NFB) is our soundtrack. See, my close friends are also DJs and they were busy indoctrinating me into the classic drum n’ bass and jungle genres. One rainy afternoon we set up the wheels of steel and recorded a live set of their favourite tracks. Later, we used it as the backbone of our journey, setting the images to the music.
Even after all these years I am proud of the little film. I was cutting my teeth on the editing software so it is full of all those little trials and mistakes that are now good memories for me. And I still love the music!
So, all these years later, during the pandemic, I decided to create a youTube channel and upload these old films. My feature-length went up with no trouble. I had cleared all the music from the artists who collaborated and I made the rest of the music myself. But, as soon as 19NT Shirt finished uploading it was immediately flagged for copyright content. Although my channel is “Not Affected”, five of the songs were flagged (correctly) and I was notified that I could not monetize and of the content.
I was surprised at the sophistication of the flagging mechanism and how fast it was picked up even though there was mixing and scratching and other manipulation of the original track, but I was not surprised that it happened. We never intended to sell our film anyways, we just want to share.
I just decided to put up my other little film about Taiwan, I Haven’t Frozen with the Thief, to add a little content to my channel. I was surprised at a different flag for this one. Again, my channel is “Not Affected”, but instead visibility will be partially blocked in some countries or regions due to one or more of the content violations. Upon further analysis, it is because of Beth Orten’s song Paris Train and although my film might not be available, you can watch her version here or another fan’s interpretation here. It is bewildering that my contribution of Orten’s song (as a small chapter in a 46-minute film) cannot be seen, while this last person’s video is ok.
Any thoughts? Please leave them in the comments.