Month: August 2010

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.

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.