It started with a feeling—a quiet, unshakable one.

Queline Meadows wasn’t planning to make a sad film. But the deeper she went into her remix of early cinema, lyrics and crumbling text, the more the tone shifted. It became something bittersweet. Melancholic. Honest.

“When I was making the film, I found it taking me in a direction that was a little sadder than I had originally planned,” Meadows said in an interview with Entertainment Flair. “I wasn’t sure if that tone would resonate with people, but it turns out it did.”

It certainly did. When I Leave the World Behind, Meadows’ eight-minute homage to artists and legacies, was named the first-place winner of the 2025 Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest. The award celebrates creative reuse of public domain content—films, music, text and art that have entered the public commons and can be freely shared and remixed.

Meadows didn’t expect the win. “I was surprised to see that it won,” she said. “I’m very proud of the work I did and was so excited to win first place.”

Her short film is hard to summarize in words, which is part of what makes it effective. Visually, it’s a collage. A movement. A mourning. She layers footage from films like Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage with floating text clipped from pre-1929 books, including The Great Gatsby. She colors frames in soft tints to mimic the fragile feel of old silent reels. Everything is aged, including the musical backbone: the 1905 ballad When I Leave the World Behind by Irving Berlin.

“I knew that I wanted to find a way to incorporate public domain text in the piece,” Meadows said. “For me, that naturally led to a lyric video.”

But this is no karaoke-style production. Instead, the lyrics unfold as paper cutouts, warped slightly in Adobe Premiere to look like they’ve been pulled from dusty archives. Meadows scoured the Internet Archive, zooming into high-resolution scans of old books and magazines, cropping individual words and letters and manually assembling them into coherent lines.

It was meticulous work. “Adding the lyrics was by far the most time-consuming part,” she said. “But I knew I wanted to include as many kinds of public domain materials as possible.”

There’s a journey at the core of the film—a quiet voyage from Earth to the Moon, guided not by rockets, but by longing.

“The passage of time is baked into the video because there’s a narrative arc—going from Earth to the Moon,” Meadows explained. “When the man is saying goodbye to Earth in the lyrics, I used a pink tint on those clips to mimic old silent film tinting techniques.”

The effect is subtle. Dust and scratches flicker across the screen. It feels like an artifact—something found in a shoebox or attic, stitched together by memory and time.

In many ways, the film is about what we leave behind. Meadows said she wanted viewers to think not only of famous films and directors, but also the forgotten ones.

“Film history isn’t all about the famous classics,” she said. “It’s also about home movies, amateur films, even instructional science videos. No matter what you make in your lifetime, your work will outlive you and find new audiences.”

That theme of legacy and impermanence is also baked into the film’s title. “They’re all very old, and some of them have fallen into obscurity,” she said of the materials she used. “I wanted to bring these materials to the forefront and show that the artists may be gone, but they are not forgotten.”

The film’s structure began with its music.

“The music was the first thing I found, aside from Woman in the Moon,” she said. “I was struck by the bittersweet tone of the song.”

Berlin’s lyrics speak of departure and remembrance. Meadows used that emotional undercurrent to guide her choices in imagery. She wanted the story to feel coherent but dreamlike—anchored in old narratives, but speaking to the present.

When it came to visuals, The Phantom Carriage offered rich material. “I initially used it because I wanted a clip related to dying, and I remembered that the movie had a Death character,” she said. “I also found a clip of a baby in that film that was used for the ‘baby upon their knees’ line.”

Even a Disney Silly Symphony made the cut. It had recently entered the public domain, and Meadows wanted to include animation to round out the visual texture.

There was only one real technical hurdle: resolution. “That comes down to me being a perfectionist and wanting the highest quality videos and images possible,” she said. “In the end, it all turned out fine.”

Meadows isn’t a filmmaker in the traditional sense. She calls herself more of a video essayist. She works mostly on YouTube, where she narrates essays about culture, media and history.

But remix contests like this one are right in her wheelhouse.

“I think that constraints are great for creativity,” she said. “I’m part of a group called The Essay Library where we try to make video essays according to certain constraints—make it 60 seconds long, finish it in 48 hours and so on.”

The Public Domain Day rules were clear: use only public domain materials. That opened up “a lot of interesting possibilities,” Meadows said.

Two other honorees—Samantha Close and William Webb—are friends of hers from the collective. “Creative constraints are very appealing to us, I guess.”

She sees enormous potential in remixing historical media. “You can use a film from 100 years ago to say something today,” she said. “Everything can be reworked, reinterpreted and reimagined again and again. It reminds us that nothing is fixed.”

Working on the project gave Meadows a deeper appreciation for the people who make film preservation possible.

“So much of early film history is lost forever; we should focus on preserving what’s left,” she said. “I think they do crucial work at the Internet Archive. It’s important to make film history accessible to all.”

In her view, these works shouldn’t be locked behind paywalls or restricted to film scholars. “In 2025, it’s incredible to be able to witness these works that survived for nearly a century or more.”

Meadows wants to continue blending archival and modern footage in future projects. “It’s important to look at film history as a whole instead of separating the old from the new,” she said. “There are themes and techniques that show up again and again.”

When asked what advice she’d give to other remix artists, her answer was simple: don’t overthink it.

“Don’t try to plan too much,” she said. “It’s good to have a vision to guide you, but you don’t have to stick to it. The best thing to do is to just watch the movies and figure out what parts speak to you.”

Winning the contest has shifted how Meadows sees her work.

“It’s given me more confidence in my work, especially because I don’t usually make stuff like this,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to make something different and find out that it still connects with people.”

She continues to work on videos for her channel, kikikrazed, and is also developing a new history-focused project called Close Ups and Long Shots. She remains active in The Essay Library and regularly helps organize creative challenges for the group.

When asked if there’s one film she’d remix if copyright wasn’t an issue, she pauses.

“I really wish all films had less copyright restrictions,” she said. “The YouTube video essay style was developed in response to the platform’s copyright system. Trying to avoid copyright claims can feel restrictive at times.”

Still, she’s hopeful. And open. In true remix fashion, she welcomes reinterpretation of her own work.

“If someone ever figures out how to remix this remix video,” she said, “I’ll be thrilled.”

As for what she hopes audiences remember?

“How it made them feel,” she said without hesitation. “If it made them think about artists who left us, I hope they go and appreciate some of their works. If it inspired them creatively, I hope they take that inspiration and create something of their own.”