Day: August 21, 2010

On the Power of Love and the Weakness of Money

A karaoke box in a skyscraper in Shinjuku, Tok...
Karaoke Building, Shinjuku

Production date: 6 July 2006
Playout date: 6/7/2006
Camera: Logitech webcam
Post Production: None
Location: Jazdow Office
Soundtrack notes: “The Power of Love”, karaoke version mp3.

This is the video where, inspired by the Russian Proverb “Don’t have 100 roubles, but have 100 friends”, in order to get one hundred subscribers (which seemed a tall order at the time, but there are 32 times that number now!) Viktor dropped a hundred rouble note in the fish tank and the fish ate it. He then goes on to sing the Power of Love, but gets interrupted as ever by a phone call.

Unfortunately the voice was too loud for the microphone settings.

Now I like to think Huliganov.TV is a place people can come to get all the “insider secrets” on my films, and so here’s a couple for this film.

1. It was not 100 Russian roubles (worth about 4 dollars) it was 100 Belarusian roubles (worth a few cents) I put in the tank,

2. The fish didn’t actually consume the note, I fished it out again afterwards. This was just to prevent the printers inks from contaminating the water.

A Day Out at Warsaw zoo

 


Production date: 6 July 2006
Playout date: 6/7/2006
Camera: Fuji Finepix
Post Production: WMM
Location: Warsaw Zoo.
Soundtrack info: Mokotow Cocktails “Swing low, sweet chariot”

This was a lovely day for me, as for the first time I managed to get all my daughters together for a day out (first and second marriages) and we went to Warsaw zoo. This is a memento of that trip.

The singing in the background was a covert recording at a practice session of the Mokotow Cocktails, and is not as finely-honed as they would normally do for performance, but I think it sounds very nice anyway, and in some places I managed to hang some images around the words of the song.

The Mokotow Cocktails were a choir in Warsaw which existed in the mid 2000s, but disbanded after the director of the choir, David B (the male voice you can hear with mine on the track) had to leave Poland as his wife was a diplomat and sent for another country posting. (I won’t use the surname because the place they went onto is somewhere I’d call less safe than Poland). Elena and I greatly enjoyed being part of it for some months towards the end. But alas, the pleasure was not destined to continue for long.

Never Smile!

 


Production date: 5 July 2006
Playout date: 5/7/2006
Camera: Fuji Finepix
Post Production: None
Location: Home on terrace

This short piece with me singing the crocodile song from Walt Dismal’s Peter Pan as Sophie rides her blow-up croc in the pool we had mainly for me, four years later, shows up the toys that really stood the test of time (we still have the slide and the plastic truck George is on, but the rocking-horse is gone. The croc is still with us and went to France this summer – where it would have stayed if I hadn’t intervened!). In the main there is far less stuff in general on the terrace – we didn’t have even room for a pool this year!

This has been watched quite a bit, and the stats have been steady at about 500 a month.