Four years ago in 2006 I wrote this song and made this video for Mr John Otto Cleese 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.

Song written by Dean Whitbread, Ashley Slater. Oh yes, and John Cleese nabbed himself a credit too.

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.

Vinvin from Seesmic enjoys a tour of John’s Californian cottage.

Videography by Whit Scott.

Produced by Vinvin, Garry Scott-Irvine and Dean Whitbread.

Watch this in HD on Vimeo.

Digg this

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.

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.

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.

Melodic melodramatic gentle psychedelic pop rock from favourite MySpace band, Unio and Petitio myspace.com/unioandpetitio.

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.

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