Shop Vac Video

By JoCo February 8, 2006

Garrick Van Buren has taken a 1950’s promotional film for suburban life called “In the Suburbs” and edited together a nice video to go along with Shop Vac – another great example of Creative Commons-enabled collaboration. The video is public domain and available on archive.org, which is a pretty amazing resource for all sorts of things.

Comments

Wilson Fowlie (aka CuriousMind) says

Interesting video. It was a little hard to watch, as the resolution wasn't great, but I liked the way it was put together.

I'm not sure that the video quite captured the sense of ... what did you call it? ... "funny tragic suburban angst power pop ennui, etc" that the song itself has. Except for maybe the 'suburban' part.

Josh says

Ya, I agree. Not much relation to the song. They sinc.ed part of it, but aside from that, not exactly what I was think about when listening to the song.

Garrick Van Buren says

Josh, Wilson,

Thanks for watching it. I see the beauty of it far more in that it could be done. Without archive.org and JC's creative commons licensing - this wouldn't even have existed. Now it does, just like that monkey/pony thing in my garage.

Even better - the original video is 20 minutes long. There's probably a better cut in there - maybe one with more of the military footage. But I'll leave that effort for someone else.

V says

Why does everyone use the version without the solo? I'm gonna develop a complex...

Paul says

Well, V, I for one LIKE the solo - hope that's some comfort.

I agree that sometimes the pictures don't really go along with the lyrics. Maybe a re-edit could be considered. Ya know there have to be about 50 million miles of footage out there, if not in Creative Commons then at least in the public domain.

Watching this made me think of another potential project - using old Civil Defense footage for a Cold War satire song. Or perhaps it's been done.

The Almighty Charles says

I have nothing to say that hasn't been said... and I have even less effort, so I'm just gonna file myself under "satisfied enough".