Ikea

A little quiet on the video front for the next couple of days as I am moving house and have just discovered the world of Ikea, which is entirely new to me.

The self-serve warehouse was pretty awesome, if only because it made me feel like I'd entered the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Actually putting stuff together is less awesome - like Lego but boring. On the upside I now have a wardrobe.

Anyway, speaking of Ikea, I love this ad:



A subset of my broader love for Spike Jonze...

Surprised

So, several days after uploading "McBain for America" it occurred to me that it would be a decent idea to post it as a response to McCain's original "624787" ad, on the off chance that some McCain campaign moderator would let it through or at least get a laugh out of it.



To my surprise, McCain seems to be allowing video responses to be posted automatically, without any pre-approval. For those not au fait with the intracacies of YouTube, when you upload a video, you can choose whether or not to allow video responses and also whether or not you need to approve the response before it shows up on the original video's YouTube page.

I'm not sure if this is by policy or oversight, but it's good nonetheless. Both Obama and Hillary "Let's Start a Conversation" Clinton are considerably more censorious. I'm curious to see how long it lasts.

While on the subject of surprises, I'm still pretty shocked that the McCain campaign is getting Powers Boothe to do his V/Os, given that he has almost uniformly played nasty characters in films and TV. I've played around with a couple of video ideas using audio from Sin City and Deadwood, but I'm not sure that the whole thing is well enough known at this stage.

Last Day

So, today is my last day working for the ABC. I still think it's pretty amazing that something that was basically a hobby a couple of months ago actually became a full-time job. That said, I am really looking forward to starting at Mallesons and getting back to law.

The flipside of this is that my production of videos might become a little less consistent. I'm planning on continuing to make stuff on the weekends, when the right ideas strike, but that will likely be less frequent than my current output.

Anyway, I just want to say thanks to everyone who has subscribed on YouTube and to those who have helped to spread the videos through their blogs and websites. I'm nearing in on 2 million total views, which is more than I ever would have imagined possible.

For those interested, here's a list of the videos I've made for Unleashed.

• Chairman Rudd Propaganda: Part Two
• Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar
• Corey Delaney's Other Party
• Clinton and Cruise - On the campaign trail
• Tom Cruise Scientology Parody - A Revealing Interview
• Japanese Whaling - The Science of Whales
• Rudd Plays the Blame Game
• Obama and McCain - The Art of Speech
• Julie Bishop's Stolen Moment
• Castro Unplugged
• Bill O'Reilly vs. Godwin's Law
• Clinton 2.0
• Multiple Choice Question Time
• AAMI Ad Parody
• I'm F*cking Obama - Hillary Clinton feat. Sarah Silverman
• Mr Rudd & Dr Nelson Have an Adventure
• McBAIN FOR AMERICA - (John McCain Ad Parody)

And a giant YouTube playlist (I recommend skipping Rudd Plays the Blame Game):

Q&A Promo - Bloopers

I recently did some editing on a promo for a new ABC show called "Q&A". The original footage wasn't that interesting, so I decided to make something out of the bloopers instead.



"Q&A" is a show hosted by Tony Jones where members of the studio and television audience get to ask questions of various politicians. Sounds like it could be quite interesting. If you live near Sydney and want to be in the audience, you can register here.

Here's hoping that the politicians are good sports about the video...

McBAIN FOR AMERICA - (John McCain Ad Parody)

Here's the new John McCain video:



Monty had the idea to do something using McCain / McBain months ago and I'm really glad that we've finally managed to put this together. For those who haven't seen the original, our video is a take on this John McCain ad:



The visual style of McCain's ads is relatively distinctive, but also very easy to mimic. I've included a few different comparisons below. More of the images used can be found in this Flickr set.



If you look closely, you can see that there's a bit of variance between some of the images I've posted and the ones used in the video. We went back and forth on a couple of different lines. I'll upload some of the final images shortly.



If you're interested in seeing a slight different version, head over to ABC Unleashed.

Anyway, I'm really happy with it as a follow up to "I'm F*cking Obama" and am curious to see how it spreads. Let me know what you think...

McBain For America - ABC Draft

EDIT: The ABC Unleashed draft is below. I've moved the rest of the content of post this post dealing with the final version so as to minimise duplication.

Corey Delaney's Other Party

Okay. Not so much on the McCain video hints over the weekend. I realised that any hint would really give away the conceit of the video. It is almost done and will be up on ABC Unleashed today and on YouTube shortly thereafter.

In the meanwhile, here's a video I made back in January. This interview with a Melbourne kid who threw a crazy party was the most popular thing on the internet for a short while. I mixed it together with a few different political interviews with Barrie Cassidy.



A few more things:

• Making this video led to the important discovery that lounge music makes everything great.
  


• A few weeks after I made this, Barrie Cassidy actually showed the video on Insiders, which made me feel like the world was folding in on itself, but which was incredibly cool.


• It actually looks quite possible that Nelson will go in August, in which case I fully expect my other videos to start coming true also: Fidel Castro will start giving crazy interviews, Kevin Rudd will become a spy and Hillary Clinton will reveal that she's a robot.
  

McCain in Progress

I'm currently working on two McCain videos, which I'm pretty excited about - I don't want to give away too much, lest someone beats me to the punch. If all goes right, they should be done towards the beginning of next week.

Speaking of being beaten to the punch, I'd been planning to use the trailer for The Dark Knight, to do a serious trailer for the very campy 1966 Batman (for which I'd just ordered the DVD). To my great disappointment, a friend pointed this video out to me:



That's pretty much what I had planned to do. It's strange (but I guess not that surprising) how often I've found that ideas that I think are very original have been done before. The same thing happened with my Changes video, which is uncannily similar to this video. In that case, I didn't find out about the similarity until after I'd made and posted my video:



Oh well... I'll drop some McCain hints over the weekend...

A Rudd & Nelson Adventure

My new video has just gone up at ABC Unleashed. It's a silent film and won't make much sense to those not familiar with Australian politics, I'm afraid.

I happened across the music used a couple of months ago, and have thought about doing a silent film ever since. Nelson and Rudd's respective "listening" and world tours seemed pretty suited to it.

My main annoyance was that I couldn't find a better ending to the video, but aside from that I'm pretty happy with it.

Hope you like it.

George Bush - My Way

Here's a video from the 2007 Sydney Uni Law Revue. In the show, these visuals played as the George Bush character sang My Way - the images for the last verse make more sense if you think about it as a duet with Cheney :)

Let me know what you think...

I wish I were this patient

I've been meaning to mess around with some stop motion ideas for a while now. I could only ever aspire to this...

Online Satire - Walkley Magazine Article

The following is a slightly edited version of a piece I wrote for the Walkley Magazine. I was meant to be writing about my own experience for an audience unfamiliar with the subject matter, so please forgive any apparent hubris, or statements of the obvious.

On March 5 last year, like thousands of others, ParkRidge47 posted a video on YouTube. “Vote Different”, which placed Hillary Clinton as the Big Brother figure in Apple’s famous “1984” commercial, would soon receive worldwide attention heralding the birth of a new type of political campaign. Philip de Vellis, the man behind the ParkRidge47 alias, had taken footage from a Clinton video, inviting viewers to be part of an online conversation, and had composited it into Ridley Scott’s original ad. “Vote Different” did indeed start a conversation, but certainly not the one the Clinton campaign would have wanted. The very advances in personal computing, typified by the original Apple ad, had enabled anyone with basic editing software to take part in this new dialogue of online, user-generated satire.



Six months later, on a lazy Saturday, hungover and with nothing better to do, I sat myself in front of my 2-year-old PC. Having jotted down phrases like “similar difference”, “earnestness offensive” and “lustrous glass jaw” while bored in a Theories of Legal Reasoning Class, I set about piecing together “Chairman Rudd’s Propaganda Philosophies”. I’d taught myself some basic editing a couple of years earlier, enough to play around with home videos and to produce an unsuccessful Tropfest entry. Using a Chinese history film I’d found in Hong Kong and whatever footage I could scrounge from the internet, the video was done within the day. On the Sunday morning, I uploaded it to YouTube, emailed it to a few friends, posted it on Facebook and didn’t think too much more of it. A week later, the video had been seen 50,000 times, Michael Brissenden had actually said “earnestness offensive” and my voting intentions had been splashed across the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Chairman Rudd” was seized upon as a reflection of the nascent guerilla campaign being waged on YouTube. The online political efforts of citizen satirists and bloggers far outstripped those of the political parties throughout the 2007 campaign. The YouTube channels of the Liberals and the ALP provided an array of videos ranging from the mediocre to the ludicrous. There was something compellingly weird and desperate in the sight of John Howard announcing funding for orangutans or Wayne Swan offering stunningly banal advice on grocery prices (items on sale are cheaper). Mainly, though, the parties used YouTube as a mere repository for television advertisements. In the meanwhile, user-generated videos like “Bennelong Time”, an anti-Howard screed set to Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll”, and other videos too feral, too unpolished or just too weird to be seen on television were spreading organically through blogs, emails and social networking sites. The very amateurish and irreverent nature of these videos provided a great part of their appeal, a fact which the political parties failed to grasp.



Some of the more hyperbolic accounts of this phenomenon suggest that the internet is enervating a previously apathetic generation, re-engaging young people with the politics. The reality, I suspect, is more nuanced. It is worth remembering that the internet user who seeks out political satire is likely to be politically active and have relatively strong convictions already. The greater value of the internet lies in its ability to overcome the tyranny of geography, the physical boundaries which separate the politically engaged. The sheer speed with which videos leap from blog to blog, country to country, is breathtaking.

Again, though, it is possible to overstate the reach of the internet. I find it both bemusing and sobering to think that one of my most viewed videos is one of my worst. A few weeks before I made the Chairman Rudd video, someone at Endemol Southern Star inexplicably decided that another of my videos, “NetAlert Ad Parody – The Treasurer”, ought to be shown on Channel Ten’s thankfully short-lived Friday Night Download. In that one airing on a failing TV show, the video received hundreds of thousands more views than will ever be received by much more deserving online satire. Aside from those relatively few videos, like “Vote Different”, which receive wide coverage in the mainstream media, most videos will only go out only to a few hundred or a few thousand people online. It is still the case that the political satire seen on shows like The Chaser’s War on Everything in Australia, or The Colbert Report in the U.S. has a reach and a quality which dwarfs that of online satire. This is not to say that user-generated satire can’t achieve a similar power, it is simply to recognise that the form is still in its infancy.



While online satire will undoubtedly continue to grow, I suspect that an equally significant though less well recognised revolution is occurring in the availability and popularity of raw news material. It is not really that surprising that a well-produced video like Will.i.am’s pro-Obama “Yes We Can” music video, or brilliant satire like “Vote Different” races around the online community. What is more impressive is that Barack Obama’s thirty four minute speech at a church in Atlanta can become the most popular video on YouTube. Internet users no longer need to settle for the 15 second grabs of television news. Online debate reflects this new reality. Not long ago, a claim, however true, that a news report had taken a statement out of context would likely sound carping and be difficult to substantiate. In a world of hyperlinks, however, bloggers are constantly referring to full transcripts and videos to debate the rights and wrongs of media coverage. The availability and popularity of this raw news material is at least as significant as the production of satirical content by the online community. Both phenomena reflect an unwillingness for political parties or large media organisations to dictate political discourse.

It is now over a year since “Vote Different” emerged and the Clinton campaign has long since abandoned its conversation conceit (EDIT: apparently not), censoring or blocking comments on its videos. Now, though, the release of a new campaign commercial is inevitably followed by a cascade of online parodies of varying quality. In Australia, the realm of online satire has quietened a little, a respite following the intensity of the election campaign. Yet, with editing software becoming more widespread and easy-to-use every day, it remains to be seen how the Australian political parties will be able to deal with the brave new world of citizen satire and online debate.

Ice Ice Baby - Redux

Here's a video I made late one night midway through last year. It's pretty experimental - but seemed like a fun way to play with the crazy lyrics to Ice Ice Baby. For some reason the timing is a little off in the YouTube version.

The connection between the images and the lyrics gets more complicated as it goes on - props to those who get the orange...

Obama and Clinton - An Excerpt from The Audacity of Hope

Not so much funny as just negative. Anyhow...

Clinton Campaign Strategy

Killed me...

Nelson in Bourke

Well, Brendan seems to be well and truly back into writing mode, but sadly his prose has gone from amusingly semi-literate to stultifyingly dull.

The new entry is only remarkable for the fact that he manages to write "Bourke" 9 times in 250 odd words, and for this statement:

"Again, as for many parts of remote Australia, getting young people to university if that’s what they choose to do is a real financial struggle in need of further policy development."

But surely no one would have the time or the resources for that sort of policy development... not unless you were... say... Education Minister for... I don't know... over four years?

Sorry. Less on the funny and more on the outraged today...

Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar

Given that I seem to be writing about Nelson at the moment, here's a little plug and a few thoughts for this video, which I made late last year in the two weeks I spent at the ABC.

The video is essentially the Liberal leadership ballot done as the Battle of Trafalgar, with Nelson winning a Pyrrhic victory - emerging fatally wounded. I tried to draw as many parallels as I could, and there is a lot of detail there which is not that apparent without a good knowledge of both the machinations of the Liberal ballot and of the battle itself.



It is certainly the least accessible video I've made so far, but I'm pretty fond of it. If for nothing else, it allowed me to play around with things like production music and sound effects, which I'd never really done before and it contains some of my better photoshopping I think. It was exceedingly cool to be able to record the V/O in an actual studio - a very long way from people speaking into the crappy microphone attached to my computer.

But yeah... it is very esoteric and the pacing doesn't quite work. Bonus points to anyone who picks the oblique Austen reference.

Pedantry

Ho hum, so Dr Nelson seems to have given up on his tour diary. Hardly an auspicious start to the Liberal Party's supposed online blitz. His most recent entry (from late last week) isn't really that noteworthy, but does begin with this gem.

"I started the day at the Adelaide Central Markets and saw my becoming good friend now, Ross Savos, who runs the Central Deli at the markets, and then went on to have the opportunity to speak to a number of the stallholders."

I guess it's better than being unbecoming.

While I'm being pedantic, this article in The Australian surprised me.

"But while Australia is the second most likely country to witness a shark attack, after the United States, most attacks remain rare and not fatal."

Most attacks are rare... but some are very common?

An Afterthought

One thing I meant to say about Clinton 2.0 - there has to be way to make an awesome Leeroy Jenkins / Iraq war video. I tried to figure one out, but couldn't make it work. If anyone's got a good idea, I'm all ears.

Speaking of Clinton 2.0, this amused me.



The obsessive focus on viewcount is uncomfortably accurate...

Japanese Whaling - The Science of Whales

I came up with the idea for this video sometime around Christmas, a fairly easy way to satirize the bogus science that used to justify Japan's whaling program.

I wasn't entirely sure where I'd get the needed footage, but happily came across a 1945 film called "Fish from Hell", which contained plenty of useful shots. The original film is pretty hilarious just for the severely dated V/O and I thoroughly recommend checking it out.



The other graphics (whale meat / natural predator) I put together using Photoshop and Premiere. I then used the "Old Cinema Filter" for VirtualDub to age the footage (I also used this on the Rudd Propaganda videos). It's a good free way of achieving this effect for anyone who's interested.

The V/O I took from a Japanese news report on the whaling controversy, but it obviously in no way matches the subtitles. I was a little worried that the video would be too similar to the Rudd Propaganda videos, and so deliberately avoided using broken English subtitles. I'm not sure of the meaning of the Japanese symbols used - if you look closely you can see that some are repeated, inverted, mirrored or rotated.



In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure that the V/O and music really work that well. The video doesn't really build to an ending, so much as just end. Sometimes it just feels a little unfinished or short to me. Anyway, in a strange coincidence, the day after the video was posted, whaling was the top story of the day in Australia and the ABC had a striking image of two dead whales at the top of its front page, with a link to my video below.

A little disappointingly, the comments on YouTube have descended into some fairly crazy racist rants. A surprising number of people don't seem to have realised that it's not a genuine video, my favourite comment being: "The translation from Japanese to English is totally wrong. I doubt about author's purpose."

An Interview with Tom Cruise

So, to the second Cruise video. I did this with Monty, who deserves the lion's share of the credit for starring and for writing the bulk of the script.

I had planned to post a few different images to show and to explain the digital manipulation it took to make the background behind Monty look even vaguely similar to the background behind Cruise. However, I seem to have deleted all of the source files. Suffice it to say that it's a very different colour.

Anyway, I really love this video, and it's been spreading pretty consistently, though it's never really taken off. Hope you like it. Let me know what you think...

Chairman Rudd

Hey. Every now and then I get emails or YouTube messages from people asking for copies of the images used in the Chairman Rudd videos: first, second. Rather than email them out individually, I've posted most of them in a set on flickr, for those who are interested.

Some of the ones from the Horatio / Brendan Nelson video are also up there in a set.

Flickr is all very new to me, so apologies if this doesn't work...

Clinton and Cruise - On the Campaign Trail

Keeping away from the "F*cking Obama" madness for a moment, I thought I'd talk a bit about the two Cruise Scientology parodies that I made a while back. One of these you might have seen already, the other you probably haven't.

Clinton and Cruise - On the Campaign Trail



This one I did in my first week at the ABC this year, and it ended up getting a bit of press here and in the US. The Cruise Scientology video and the footage of Clinton "crying" in New Hampshire had been two of the most viral videos online over the week or two before that. I was looking to do something with one video or the other, when I realised how similar the two were - sharing not only common phrases but also a mutual, over-the-top and self-important sincerity.

To make it, I took transcripts of the two videos, read through them and pieced together similar words and phrases. Happily, there were a lot more similarities than I ever would have hoped for. The video took a while to make, but came together pretty easily. The "Thanks El" at the end of the video relates to my little sister who stayed up with me working on a draft and commenting on what worked and what didn't.

The most difficult decision in the whole thing was whether or not to include a laughter montage at the end - one of the most obvious similarities between Clinton and Cruise is their crazy laughter. It was funny, but it made the video more of an all out attack than it really needed to be. I might still find a way of posting it. I've toyed with doing a dance remix of the video, because there are so many awesome Mission Impossible dance tunes. It would probably fit in better with that. Anyway, if that's something people are interested in seeing, I'll probably put it together when I finish up at the ABC in a couple of weeks, assuming that Clinton is still in the race.

Anyway, enough for now. I'll post a few words about the Cruise Interview I did with Monty tomorrow...

Wow

Well I certainly didn't expect this.

I'd hoped that the video would spread, but I never imagined that it would go so fast or so wide. Thanks to everyone who's been commenting on the video and on the blog. I've particularly appreciated hearing where people have found the video and where they've posted it. It's pretty amazing how quickly something can leap from page to page.

The other weird thing is how many duplicates have popped up in the day and a half that the video has been up. There are already a handful on YouTube. And it seems that as many people have seen the video through College Humor, Break, or Funny or Die as through my original YouTube posting. I was pretty surprised as I didn't upload it to any of those sites.

Not entirely sure how I feel about all that. Overall, I'm really glad that so many people are seeing my video. It's just a bit rough not being able to keep track of how many people have seen it. I guess it's just the flipside of a video going viral. As long as people aren't directly profiting from my work, I'm not likely to do anything about it - anyhow the copyright in the video belongs to the ABC under my contract. If anyone's got a more solid understanding of the internet etiquette concerning all of this, I'd be interested to hear what you've got to say.

Anyway, thanks again for all the comments. And, once again, massive props to my brother Jez, who came up with the idea a couple of months ago when the original Silverman/Damon video first took off online. He said back then that a Clinton/Obama video could go viral and he was certainly right.

Now just a random plug for a video I did a month or so ago. I'm really proud of it, but never really found an audience.



Let me know what you think...

I'm F*cking Obama

Here it is. Feel free to spam everyone you know.

Let me know what you think...

Huh

Came across this College Humor video. Kinda similar to my Clinton 2.0 video, but with a very different tone, and evidently a lot more money. Strange coincidence that they both came out at pretty much the same time.