2025 Public Domain Day Remix Contest: The Internet Archive is Looking For Creative Short Films Made By You! (2025)

Posted on December 16, 2024 by Chris Freeland

The Cocoanuts – 1929 – The Marx Brothers

We invite filmmakers and artists of all skill levels to celebrate Public Domain Day on January 22, 2025, by creating and uploading 2–3 minute short films to the Internet Archive!

This contest offers a chance to explore and reimagine the creative treasures entering the public domain, including works from 1929—classic literature, silent films, music, and art. Participants are encouraged to use materials from the Internet Archive’s collections to craft unique films that breathe new life into these cultural gems.

Top entries will be awarded prizes up to $1,500, with winners announced during our in-person Public Domain Day Celebration on January 22, 2025, at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco. All submissions will be featured in a special Public Domain Day Collection on archive.org and highlighted in a January 2025 blog post.

Join us in this creative celebration of cultural heritage and timeless art!

Here are a few examples of some of the materials that will become public domain on January 1, 2025:

• Books! E.g. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, a timeless tale of love and war. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, a revolutionary modernist novel. The English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a seminal anti-war novel.
• Periodicals! Black Thursday – October 24, 1929: The stock market experienced a massive drop, with panic selling beginning. Black Monday – October 28, 1929: The market fell even more sharply, accelerating the crisis. Black Tuesday – October 29, 1929: The Great Depression begins.
• Music! The musical composition of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain, as well as the first recordings of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
• Movies! The Cocoanuts with the Marx Brothers, Un chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali. The first Silly Symphony cartoons, including The Skeleton Dance.

Guidelines

• Make a 2–3 minute movie using at least one work published in 1929 that will become Public Domain on January 1, 2025. This could be a poem, book, film, musical composition, painting, photograph or any other work that will become Public Domain next year. The more different PD materials you use, the better!
  • Note: If you have a resource from 1929 that is not available on archive.org, you may upload it and then use it in your submission. (Here is how to do that).
• Your submission must have a soundtrack. It can be your own voiceover or performance of a public domain musical composition, or you may use public domain or CC0 sound recordings from sources like Openverse and the Free Music Archive.
  • Note: Sound recordings have special status under Copyright Law, so it’s important to note that while musical compositions from 1929 will be entering the public domain, the sound recordings of those works are not. Sound recordings published in 1924 will enter the public domain.
• Mix and Mash content however you like, but note that ALL of your sources must be from the public domain. They do not all have to be from 1929. Remember, U.S. government works are public domain no matter when they are published. So feel free to use those NASA images! You may include your own original work if you put a CC0 license on it.
• Add a personal touch, make it yours!
• Keep the videos light hearted and fun! (It is a celebration after all!)

Submission Deadline

All submissions must be in by Midnight, January 17, 2025 (PST)

How to Submit

• Create an Internet Archive Account
• Upload your film to archive.org with a subject tag field of “public domain day film contest 2025” in the upload form
• Link all your sourced materials from 1929 in the upload description

Prizes

• 1st prize: $1500
• 2nd prize: $1000
• 3rd prize: $500

Judges will be looking for videos that are fun, interesting and use public domain materials, especially those from 1929. They will be shown at the in-person Public Domain Day party in San Francisco and should highlight the value of having cultural materials that can be reused, remixed, and re-contextualized for a new day. Winners’ pieces will be purchased with the prize money, and viewable on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license.

• Amir Saber Esfahani (Director of Special Arts Projects, Internet Archive)
• Rick Prelinger (Board Member, Internet Archive, Founder, Prelinger Archives)
• BZ Petroff (Director of Admin & HR, Internet Archive)
• Special guest judges

For reference, check out the 2024 Entrants