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Music

Filmmaker Turns Take-Down Notice Into Collaborative Internet Project

How Catrin Hedström gave her music video a new lease on life through a collaborative, crowd-sourced video project.

There must be few things in the life of a young filmmaker worse than finding the loathsome take-down request in their inbox. After investing months of time, energy, creativity, passion, and money into a project, it’s no doubt excruciating see it bound and gagged by copyright laws and restrictions. Having to kill your brain child is never an easy task, but NYC-based filmmaker Catrin Hedström seems to have found a way to at least put hers on life support.

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The details surrounding this incident sound a bit murky—Hedström was apparently “encouraged by a band she loved to make a music video” for them, and after months of work published the resulting video online, only to have the band send her a take-down notice a week later. (The band in question, though not revealed on Hedström’s own site appears to be Free Blood… or at least, that’s what our Googling has pointed to.) Why the band asked her to take down her video is unclear, especially since it seems to be a perfectly fine, well-crafted video, though on the more experimental/weird/provocative side of things.

Hedström responded by stripping the music, which she did not have rights to, from the video and releasing her raw media files online under Creative Commons licensing. She’s now encouraging the creative community to collaborate with her on video mash-ups using her footage—either by writing and recording their own music to coincide with her version of the video or re-cutting and re-purposing her footage to make their own work. She’s compiling these projects on her blog and, while most of them are pretty terrible, each contribution seems to be another “eff you” from Hedström to the band that screwed her over.

Hedström’s original video:

A few of the submissions she’s gotten thus far: