Tag Archives: video

Don’t Mention The World Cup

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In 2006 Mr John Otto Cleese delivered a wonderful football song. We wrote the song and made this video to coincide with the World Cup. You know – THE World Cup – the FIFA World Cup. Football. The game played with the feet. By the whole world. Didn’t do too badly.

The song was conceived and written by Dean Whitbread and Ashley Slater, with John nabbing himself a song credit as the creative inspiration he is.

This rousing tune re-introduced John to his many of his forgotten UK fans, as well as many younger football fans. It also gained him a lot of support from thousands of the UK Military and their radio station based in Germany. Remember, in 2006 Germany was hosting the World Cup. So while it didn’t super fly high, Don’t Mention The World Cup did very respectably indeed.

Aside from the music and the famous Mr Cleese’s presence, what also made this song work was the superb campaign run by Paul Carey.

Read about it here: https://smallpictures.co.uk/press.html

John Cleese’s New Headcast Video Downloads

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We were very busy working on producing John Cleese’s new videos, to be released via his Headcast website on June 7th 2009, and also the internet campaign which surrounds the launch.

As well as video production which includes animation, music composition, sound and graphic design, our work also includes a new shop featuring authorised merchandise, World of Cheese, and a revamped email list, dubbed the John Cleese Nigerian Lottery which as John points out on Twitter, you don’t have to be Nigerian to enter.

Good Times

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Nice coverage of our recent online video work with John Cleese and Seesmic from Nigel Kendall at the Times – does coverage from the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Times constitute a full house?

This piece includes a comment on the timing of John’s recent ads for some banks which have fallen foul of the great financial tsunami:

One of the great comedy clichés is that the secret is in the timing, and Cleese is a master. Ponder, for instance, his timing of a recent series of commercials for Kaupthing (tinyurl.com/6fecxu). It’s the biggest company in Iceland, he tells us. Not any more it isn’t. Kaupthing was one of the biggest casualties of the recent global banking collapse. We can only hope that Cleese’s similar commercial for the Polish bank BZ WBK Commercial, at tinyurl.com/5khe4h, was more successful. As he heads into his eighth decade, he’s clearly planning for the medical attention he may need by his ninth. Happy birthday, Mr Cheese. He’s from Santa Barbara via Weston-super-Mare, you know.

John Cleese on Sarah Palin

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This short trailer for the Seesmic John Cleese interview did spectacularly well, reaching over half a million views in under a week, and achieving the notable status of the most viewed video in the world on October 14th. As of today, it’s been viewed 931,950 times.

We were number one on Digg (see below), featured in various newspapers in the UK and elsewhere, and Seesmic trebled their traffic. The Palin/Parrot connection has also inspired a cartoon by some opportunist comedians.

John Cleese does terribly well

Executive production by Dean Whitbread and Garry Scott-Irvine of Small Pictures, videography by Whit Scott who writes a nice post about the mission here and edited by Jeremey Lavoi, who writes another nice post here.

Unio and Petitio: Thrill Seeker

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Melodic melodramatic gentle psychedelic pop rock from once favourite MySpace band, Unio and Petitio.

This is the final edit – slightly better transitions and less compressed audio. It was fun to combine mobile footage with DV and HD – I really like mixing up the video sources – and also getting to exploit some of the funkier plug ins in Final Cut.

Who’s Watching Who

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Promotional video for the Open Rights Group openrightsgroup.org – the UK’s foremost campaigners for digital and online rights.

Written, Produced and Directed by Dean Whitbread.

Videography: Rani Khanna and Mark Crook.

Featuring: Felix Cohen, Patricia Hanrahan, Harry Metcalfe, Mark Levitt, Glyn Wintle, Michael Holloway, Tom Reynolds, Dean Whitbread.

Music: “Who’s Watching Who?” by Cinema Du Lyon cinema-du-lyon.eu

A Small Pictures Production 2008

Licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa/2.0/uk