Attenborrowed

One of the lasting joys of MozFest is watching projects that were conceived over the three-day weekend explode post-festival with lives of their own.
Attenborrowed is a great example of a MozFest-inspired creation that has grown into something huge. This mash-up video, which juxtaposes BBC naturalist David Attenborough’s calm, precise narration with Miley Cyrus’ infamous twerking performance, offers a sly social commentary. Created in a London hotel room as a proof of concept to demo at the MozFest Science Fair, the video was an instant hit with festival attendees. Less than two weeks later, Attenborrowed was closing in on one million views on Vimeo.


Attenborrowed was produced by Wreck & Salvage, a trio of remix artists and internet dumpster divers that mine online repositories of corporate propaganda, memes and archival footage to generate strangely insightful video gems. Skilled video editors, the Wreck & Salvage crew has adopted Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker as one of their preferred creative tools:
“Popcorn Maker is perfect for creating quick internet art. It allows you to actively participate and change culture, instead of being a passive spectator of it. You can pull in and search for animated gifs, music, images, and once they’re in the timeline, you can link each element wherever you wish. We use it as an incubator for ideas: “What if I pair this with that?” Instead of taking the time to download them and throw them in Final Cut Pro, we can throw some links in Popcorn and see if it works.  It’s also super easy to grab someone’s work and remix it using your own ideas.”
— Nelson from Wreck & Salvage
Wreck & Salvage has a series of Attenborrow Popcorn videos that anyone can remix:
Gif Spores  reveals there are more similarities than you might realize between fungal spores and animated gifs.

Dramatic Displays  reminds us that in nature, as on the dance floor, dramatic displays are used as a warning to avoid a potential fight to the death.

True to the nature of MozFest, the Wreck & Salvage team met other creative people and contributed to their projects throughout the weekend. Quirk collaborated with the folks at Creative Commons to design an Intellectual Property Donor badge as a way to signify that you have donated your complete body of your work into the public domain. Nelson got involved in Hackaid, which helps give people in disaster areas the experience, tools and knowledge used by other people in similar situations.
“Mozfest embraces the chaotic serendipitous spirit of creativity, throws a bunch of amazing enthusiastic people from a bunch of different fields pursuing their own interests into one huge building, and gives them the time, tools, freedom and space to create and collaborate on internet/life/world-altering projects.” — Nelson from Wreck & Salvage

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