Category Archives: Music not sung or played by me
This includes music videos made for other people’s songs where I’m not singing, or recordings I made of performances, etc.
Snippets from various performers (South Africa Series 5/10)
| Playout date: | 19 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Cape Town conference centre near the Arabella |
| Other people featured: | Conference goers, performers |
| Genre: | Conference |
| Music used: | Several performances by Cape Town groups |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | None |
If there’s one thing I miss about the old firm’s conferences it is the amount of music and entertainment they laid on. The ones done by my current group are a bit more low key in that regard. Here’s an example of what the opening ceremony of the Cape Town conference looked like.
On the Waterfront at Cape Town (South Africa Series 2/10)
| Playout date: | 12 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Cape Town, South Africa, Victoria and Albert Waterfront |
| Other people featured: | Performers on the waterfront |
| Genre: | Walking with camera |
| Music used: | “This could be heaven for everyone” by Queen – Karaoke version |
| Languages used: | English with some singing in a Bantu language |
| Animals featured: | Red wing starlings Onychognathus morio |
This series, possibly beginning with this one, even though it is the 102nd video uploaded to YouTube, marks a certain development in the way I presented the video material. The cutting in of background music, the use of a common intro for series, the gallery shots with background music. This is an early prototype of about 2 or 3 hundred similarly style films from travel to different places. It’s not exactly the mode I settled into, but it’s well on the way there.
One thing I quite like about this one looking back is the attempt to use music in the backing track together with the ambient noises, like the drums of the waterfront performers here on the Victoria and Albert Waterfront in Cape Town. I have great memories of this place and would be happy to go to Cape Town again if ever I get the chance.
Apart from anything else, there were friendships made there which gave me a lot of value in my life. Just that alone, even if it had been nothing like the paradise it was, would have been well worth the trip.
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- Eating my way around Cape Town, South Africa – Guest Blogger Hg2 (mrsoaroundtheworld.com)
To Elena – the woman I love
| Playout date: | 2 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – heavy use |
| Location: | Various |
| Other people featured: | My wife, Elena |
| Genre: | Gallery type (based on photographs) |
| Music used: | Okoldovana, ocharovana’ by St Petersburg. Aka “Dragotsennaya ty moya zhenshchina”. |
| Languages used: | Russian |
| Animals featured: | None |
This was my 100th video, and so I wanted to mark it out in a special way, and nothing is more special to me than my wife, and therefore it was a natural thing to do to dedicate this film to her, and to show my viewers a few of the photos I’ve taken of her over the years.
The music playing in the background is one of my wife’s favourite Russian songs, by the group Sankt Peterburg. The song’s title “Dragotsennaya Ty moya zhenshchina” . This means my precious woman, so I thought it was appropriate.
This is a gallery type video intended to showcase photography, but some of these shots were done by friends.
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Three Dimensional Prague Walk
What this is, is the second of about four or five Prague vlog videos all taken on a walk the same evening. It carries on from the film A Summer Prague which you’ll find in the Travel and Places category – Czech Republic on this blog. This part starts in the Andel area where I’m looking for something to eat, and then start to walk home, and notice that a lot of the advertising on the sides of the streets as well as the reliefs of the buildings in the area seem to have a 3D motif, such as the U Buldoka sculptured pub sign. It is all in great light and in HD, with a selection of nice background tracks, as in this case, and some effects too now and again. This gives you some of the essence of Prague in the summer.
No music in the sound track of this one, but some more nice music is coming up in later parts of the walk…
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In the Eastern Forest
| Playout date: | 3 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – medium use |
| Location: | Primorskiy Kray, Russia |
| Other people featured: | Various Foresters |
| Genre: | Environmental |
| Music used: | Solovenko Ukrainian Songs |
| Languages used: | Russian, Ukrainian |
| Animals featured: | Not many other than the ladybirds on the video, but this is the domain of the Siberian Tiger, black bear and snow leopard. Numerous unusual forest plants are also seen in the gallery |
It’s a long story how I came to be here, and in fact I can’t go into details at it involves work – I ended up auditing the forestry operators of a territory larger than Greater London. The climate was hard and the Mosquitos were hard. I was working for China, and they needed an English speaker who knew Due Diligence and knows Russian, and they received recommendations that I was the man for the job.
Well, it took all summer five years ago, and I still have the Mosquito bites. The gallery shots show in places the anti mosquito suit they managed to bite through. suffice it to say they are simply not in the same league as the European ones.
This is one of my earliest “gallery style” films showcasing photographs and I haven’t really got the style right, they are flashing through too quickly and they’re not fading into each other as I started doing when I got the hang of it.
But still some of the photos are not too bad though I say so myself and worth a few additional comments – the foresters were very friendly folk, we spend a great few days with people that live a very close to nature way in the forest in conditions that most of us would find wearing. These are not the kind of parks you get in Europe. They are logging and replanting in forests that are being cultivated effectively for the first time. This sort of forest in Europe exists only in any size in Bialoweza, where the bison are. The fauna here is very varied, but it’s not common to see them. When I went behind a tree to go to the toilet at one point, I saw a Siberian chipmunk, or “burunduk” – but when I told the woodsmen about it they said that when I go off to have a leak I’d better let them know so that they can cover with a rifle, because it’s when they do what I just did that they come across other “stripey animals” but ones who are more inclined to attack us than the burunduk are!
We saw cedar nut trees and manchurian nut, and those strange grape like things that you see in the woodsman’s hand – to get them he swung out over a fifty-foot drop on a tree branch, as agile as a monkey. Also you’ll see the huge ladybirds that they had there, you can see one that landed on me – they are so pick that when they land on you it feels like someone’s flicked you with their finger.
The tipped over lorry full of logs you can see in one photo there goes to show how tough the terrain is there – they basically dig their roads out as they woork the forest.
Don’t miss also near the end the home-made fitness area they made for themselves from various machine parts. It showed their skill in making do.
Related articles
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- Become a Fool for Forests (philipcarrgomm.wordpress.com)
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Concert for Polish Grandparents
One of my Polish viewers who now lives in the UK didn’t believe that concerts on Grandma and Granda‘s day (near the end of January) are marked with concerts all over Poland, as she didn’t remember any from her school days.
The fact is that this piece of Polish charm was actually imported from the United States during the 1980s! It seems like the typical piece of socialism hangover, but the funny thing about Poland in the eyes of an Englishman is that a lot of things which we are tempted at first glance to write off to the Communist era actually has a completely different explanation.
That’s why you still see May holidays, Red plaques by buildings, military parades all over the place, grandparents’ day concerts and the habit of putting the water in the cup in restaurants without the bag – which I always assumed to be an East Europeanism until I got precisely the same in the States. Some of these things which the British would wave off as Sovietisms actually come from a totally different direction.
If Freddy Chopper had really liked Warsaw, nobody was stopping him staying! As it was he left even despite the fact that Konstancja was there. That's how desparate he was to go...
ANYWAY, this was Sophie’s first ever piano recital in front of a hall full of people. We thought she was going to be given a proper piano and not this joke of an instrument. Notice also how the music teacher doesn’t give any credit for the talents of the piano playing kids to their teachers (Sophie’s teacher is sitting with Irina and me in the audience cringing with the amateurishness of it all) as naturally there is nothing of the sort available in the State curriculum. The appalling song at the end about Warsaw being Chopin‘s city (which he dreamed of nothing but escaping, despite his liking for one girl there) which has been shoved out at kids in all the Warsaw schools just as a recorded karoke piece – although the sheet music is available on the internet just in case any Warsaw school music teacher can actually read musical notation. Some pieces were played by the music teacher not on the tape recorder, that fine baroque instrument, but on a guitar of which 1 of the 6 strings was absent and I think she knew a good 4 or 5 different chords.
I didn’t write all of this in the YT description and discussion, I’ve saved it for here as I like to give you a separate perspective on here, or why would you come? The videos are all on YT and some of you have already watched them once.
Please add your thoughts on musical education in schools, including answering the poll on what the government policy should be.
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A Summer Prague
What this is is the first of about four or five Prague vlog videos all taken on a walk the same evening. One colleague took me back to Prague from outside in his car – we had been doing a due diligence out towards the West – and I got out a while away from the centre so as to give myself the opportunity for a walk in the lovely weather. I came into the Andel area by tram, which is the part you see here, and then in the forthcoming instalments you’ll see how I walked home from Andel. And it is all in great light and in HD, with a selection of nice background tracks, as in this case, and some effects too now and again. This gives you some of the essence of Prague in the summer.
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Yom Kippur 2010
This is a Reformed Judaism service, in full. It would not have been permitted to record in an Orthodox setting. It’s the Friday Night Yom Kippur service in the Warsaw Beit.
In order to protect the privacy of worshippers, the image is obscured.
These tunes and prayers are hundreds and sometimes thousands of years old, unchanged, enjoy.
Don’t miss the enlightening explanations and sermons by the Rabbis. They tell a few fine stories in this service!
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