No Messing Around? You lot have some brass!

Walking around the part of Prague where the professional offices are, you tend to see around the coppery plates outside the offices of legal firms, notaries, etc the notice “to neni mosaz” which means “this isn’t brass”. Presumably that’s to deter thieves from stealing the plaque and melting it down so that it can be made into plaques for other lawyers or maybe even sold back to the ones who lost it in the first place. Continue reading “No Messing Around? You lot have some brass!”

Introducing Alfie Mullard


Production date: 1 July 2006
Playout date: 1/7/2006
Camera: Logitech webcam
Post Production: None, single take.
Location: Home, Warsaw.

This is still the one and only film of Alfie Mullard, the Cockney culturalist, which has currently been seen 2222 times and has 10 thumbs up and 5 down, however some people really did like it and a few of my friends have been asking for more of Alfie Mullard. I was always going to do a series of him reading Shakespeares sonnets (or “songits” as he calls them) and then getting upset whenever he came across a word that he misunderstood as something rude, but I didn’t quite get to do it yet and that’s something that may well still happen one day.

Check out the insect buzzing across at one point in this – an Idiocerus vitreus, which we had a minor plague of that year.

Summer Morning on the Terrace


Production date: 27 June 2006
Playout date: 27/6/2006
Camera: Fuji Finepix
Post Production: None – but audioswap done in YT
Location: Home on terrace

This 26 second otherwise very ordinary piece is worth commenting on for two reasons, really. firstly, it has for no apparent reason risen to over 500 views per month on average for the simple reason that the centre frame features “Aunty” Irina in a black bikini. This tells us the easy way to achieve success on YT.

The second point worth commenting is that the same video has had now three audio tracks – the first was uploaded just with the camera sound that was going on that morning, and shortly after that YT started to offer a feature called “audioswap” where you could get royalty free music (in exchange for allowing an advert on the side of the piece concerned) and replace the original soundtrack with this. It was a good way round the time when you could get a good piece of video blocked and a black mark on your account for using proprietary music.

I replaced the audio that wasn’t copyrighted with one “royalty free” track offered by YT, and shortly after they told me it was blocked and so I had to do the audio swap again. You could in theory audioswap a piece of video as often as you liked.