Narratives - Digital Creativity

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Trevor looks like an average guy in his late teens. But recently he’s found, as he’s becoming famous, that he gets a lot more attention from girls at his high school. Turns out, he’s one of hottest hands on Revver, a new online video-sharing service. And he’s even making a little bit of money for his troubles, which only further enhances his sense of well-being.

Trev specializes in mash-ups. He started by digitizing parts of his favorite TV shows and posting them to YouTube, but he found that they kept getting taken down and he’d have to create new user accounts to keep uploading files. Plus, other people were posting regular TV all over the web, and he didn’t see the point after a while. Then he got a Mac for his birthday. It had the coolest suite of editing software. He started to shoot a bit of digital video, but mostly he would find clips other people made online. He’d stitch them together on his Mac, overlay a music track he liked, and post them online. He called himself the MashUpKing.

Trev specialized in humor. He liked to make fun of politicians, mainly, but other people he thought were stupid would do, too. He found that his videos had the most impact if he pulled together a bit of film footage, or an old ad, that people would recognize, and used a popular soundtrack, the impact of his mash-up would be greatest. A tiny bit of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show didn’t usually hurt, either. But the key was that it had to be funny, and maybe a bit weird.

Trevor’s videos started to get incredibly popular. His big break came when his mash-up, “Don’t You Love Me Anymore?,” a satire on the Tony Blair-George Bush relationship, showed up in the “Editor’s Picks” section of a big video site. From then on, every time “MashUpKing” uploaded a video on Revver or YouTube, he’d get at least a hundred thousand views. He got “favorited” by more users on one social network than any other video producer. Bloggers all over the web started to call him a “leading independent media artist” and Revver began to send him checks that had a couple of zeros in them.

And then his friends at school began to notice. Trevor had a hot hand.