What Makes a Good Copyright Violating AMV?

Arguably, the film Fantasia was not just the first music video (or, rather, a combination of long music videos) in the technical sense of pairing moving images and music.

It may also be viewed as the forerunner to the homemade animated music video or, as typed in YouTube video contests, the AMV. That is, the process of finding animated (or, in other homemade videos, live action) footage that brings new meaning to a particular song.

Some AMVs aim for sentiment, but not necessarily quality sentiment. Say, the pairing of well-recognized scenes from Disney movies to a sappy pop song without an effort to match the lyrics to the visuals or the Grey's Anatomy fan video whose aim is to say McDreamy/George/Mark/every male surgeon in Seattle Grace is soooo cute… enjoy 3 trillion 2-second clips of him. There are also the videos devoted to written (usually unwritten) pairings of characters. Some of these are kind of funny; most are not worth watching.

Others, however, take a step beyond the obvious, making unusual connections between separate films, giving someone a funny singing voice, contrasting a film's actual tone with the background song's tone, and somtimes all three at once.

Some of my favorites are:

The video with news clips of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, set to "Endless Love." There are several copies of this on YouTube.

Clips of Georgette (from Oliver and Company) set to "Prima Donna" from Phantom of the Opera. By YouTube user TheTerrierQueen.

Clips from almost every Disney movie set to "Hair" as an ode to, well, hair. The person who made the video found a clip to match just about every type of hair mentioned in the song (polka-dotted, twisted, braided, waxen, shining, down to there hair). By YouTuber agentcoffee.

The Firefly video to "All Theses Things That I've Done" by YouTuber cnstrikesback.

DaJugglingFool's video "Why is the Rum Gone: Remix" does a very nice job of sound mixing and pairing said sound effects with the video clips and adding unexpected clips (and audio!) from the Teletubbies, the Terminator and 24 into a video about Pirates of the Carribbean. 

I would post the hyperlinks, but haven't figured out how to do so in Blogger, which is why it will be a while before I make any AMVs.