Original YT playout date: 12 December 2009
Duration: 4:41
This film is made with material from the BBC website’s Digital Revolution section. There is a share-alike license allowing any YouTuber to do a Cassetteboy wannabe attempt on a collection of interview footage and other programme collateral such as music and graphics and city shots. I don’t have time to make a very serious competition entry, but since it’s allowed I thought I’d have a little mischief with Stephen Fry, Marissa Mayer, Chad Hurley et al, here. The link to the site if you want to join in is at the end of the film. Continue reading “If Cassetteboy can do it, why can’t I?”→
Playout date: 4 February 2007
Duration: 3:43
Views at the time added to HTV: 2,487
Likes at the time added to HTV: 13
Dislikes at time added to HTV: 8
Popularity % ” ” ” =L/(L+D): 61.9%
Comments at time added: 4
Total interactions at time added: 25
Camera: Hypercam
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – heavy use
Location: Home
Other people featured: None
Genre: music video
Music used: New Numa by Variety Beats, featuring Chad Russell
Languages used:
Animals/plants featured: None
Other remarks:
This is the final entry to the contest. About ten posts about on this blog, you may remember seeing my initial attempt which was disqualified by the judges for having “nudity” (the guy was in fact in plum coloured underpants) and for using parts of another movie (purposes of satire weren’t clearly defined on YT back then). My entry here has rememdied those issues, and the shifting position of the underwear got past the censors even though in some respects it was worse than the so called “nakedness” of the first attempt, but it still didn’t win. It was an “also ran”. One among a couple of hundred entries by the early YT community. The one which did wouldn’t be winning any contests these days, but these days there’s no YT community so there aren’t any contests.
Things do tend to go full circle though. When the next big thing is somewhere else maybe YT will still be a community of die-hard survivors who went through the corporate years unnoticed, like early mammals among the therapods. Who can say?
The various tricks and edits that I have here are about where I was after the first 140 or so videos and all the experimenting I had been doing. Today I would spend a lot longer on something like this, and produce something with many more cuts, but then again I doubt I would have time to do it anyway.
Anoth thought, has anyone noticed how Russian is considered a “cool” language to learn and people are anxious to learn it and then show themselves off speaking it, or singing it, in this case? That’s good, but the learner always has difficulty in realising that there is more still to come and in this case the Russian is admittedly a bit painful, and I advise those who are learning the language not to learn the mistakes in this song. Probably a native helped them, but not that much.
This was made on May 27th 2006, when I had been on YouTube already over three months. The day before had been my birthday, and my parents had been here in Warsaw. For my birthday gift they gave me my first ever webcam, and the next day I got on it and started to do characters. Viktor Huliganov was born. This is the first ever Viktor video – he was going to be an amusing shady Russian businessman at first, but developed into more of a crazy professor, once the Russian lessons started. Although, of course, the one does not necessarily exclude the other. This marks the end of my “early attempts” section, and is therefore the last film in this section. With this film I transferred into the next phase of what I’ve been doing on the internet ever since.
Viktor has come to life in more ways than one. He blogs, he makes Russian lessons, he writes books, he talks on the radio. People write to me as Viktor, talk to me as Viktor, some people still think after watching many Viktor films that there really is this Russian dude – more sophisticated viewers are aware that it is a persona but want the persona to live anyway, and so they continue to address and to follow Viktor Huliganov. I had no idea of the success that this would have when I started doing it.
Some people have accused me of doing a Borat, but there are big differences in style on the one hand, but on the other hand, I have been impersonating the Russian accent ever since Sacha Baron Cohen was running around in short trousers. There are many sources for the Huliganov persona, not all of them Russians, actually. If Borat is on that list anywhere it is not high on the list and not with any intention or awareness on my part.
This film shows that I was trying to experiment but I still only had the Fuji which was trained on the monitor. This is the last film I took and uploaded that had to rely solely on that one technology, but already you can see the desire to experiment a bit more with the films. The next film I did after this one was a radical departure…
Another carol from the same carol concert as earlier. This is Richard Berkeley’s choir here in Warsaw singing “Przybiezeli do Betlejem”, a famous Polish “kolęda” or carol. Again just a single verse here owing to the tiny memory card I had when starting off. Since that time everyone’s memory card is now much bigger, and I sometimes wonder which is driving which – is YouTube driving the technology available on the highstreet, is it the highstreet which is driving YT, or is it both ways?
