Canadian singer and producer Grimes released the video for her track ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around’ on 1st April – but what she was doing was not an April Fool.
The video consists of her performing in front of a green screen and you can occasionally see the edge of the set and the wind machine whirring away in the corner. She added in the YouTube description that she had shot five different videos to create visuals for the campaign for her fifth album, Miss Anthropocene, which came out in February.
“Anyhow – Because we’re all in lockdown we thought if people are bored and wanna learn new things, we could release the raw components of one of these for anyone who wants to try making stuff using our footage,” she posted.
This “open call to creatives in isolation” to remix the video using the footage is part of a partnership with WeTransfer who are making what it terms the Grimes Art Kit available. It includes links to the raw footage, cover art, audio files and lyrics.
Anyone making a video is asked to upload it to YouTube using the song name in the video title along with the accompanying hashtag #GrimesArtKit (thereby ensuring these uploads are “automatically approved”).
Grimes will select her favourite entries and they will be pulled together on a curated playlist on her YouTube channel.
Another remix competition for the single followed a week later with a different partner, focusing on the audio this time. On Native Instruments’ community platform, Metapop, the files were made available. Everyone entering by uploading their remix gets a $25 Native Instruments voucher and a month of free samples/loops from Sounds.com.
There are other prizes of Native Instruments software and hardware but, according to the competition, “in the spirit of DIY creation, there will be no judging”. Instead, winners will be selected at random.
We have seen many remix competitions in the past but this one stands out precisely because it draws in two different sponsors and is aimed at two very different creator audiences (audio and video) by setting them tasks that require very different skills.
