Damien Mulley

See it starts out well but then goes downhill after the first 30 milliseconds. I can just see them planning this over their half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon.

Roight, the main requirement, roight, is not to make him look wooden, so, ye know, I think we need to make him as animated as possible.

And that they did. Ladies and gentlemen it’s the elastic spastic show! All he was short was to tap dance. Actually if he did he’d get more respect. Right now the video starts off with a twist, a lean, a hand moving from one side to the other of the body and resting on the other hand.

He’s talking a little too quickly. Props bad. Put the paper down. Stop saying contract so much, stop talking about signing it so much. There’s repetition to enforce something and there’s repetition in a way that tells the audience “Dearest fuckwits.” Guess which Enda appears to be doing? Now, why are you looking at us like that? You appear to be lecturing us. You are acting like a teacher giving out to a naughty child. Get away from behind the desk, it makes you looking like you do not treat the viewers equally.

And then there’s the middle. STOP SHOUTING. It’s torture. Stop shouting “sign the contract”. This is the kind of shit that they force prisoners in Guantanamo to watch on repeat in order to break them. Only FG fanboys thought the speech was worth watching again.

The video ends then with the whole teacher pupil relationship and not the fantasty school uniform, misbehaving school pupil being punished by the hot teacher. Like they’d have anyone able to fill that roll anyway… Overall this is awful. The idea and the facts are good but the implementation was beyond lousy. But at least FG had their leader in their video besides old bats talking about Fianna Fail being amazing cos they gave them electricity and brought the wheel and fire to Ireland.

Update: The killer quote from Treasa:

I think your party political broadcast is a shambles and poorly produced and patronising and all sorts of bad things like that…and if I think you paid good money to communications consultants for it, I’ll wonder if I can trust Fine Gael to get me value for money when they can’t get value for their own

The techno music in the background, they appealing to boyracers? The constant moving of the fucking camera is REALLY annoying. Stop. Stoppppp. Getting seasick here!

Why are there no Fianna Fáil people in the video? Where’s Bertie? The content itself is hilarious, with people talking about the great stuff that FF have done. Plastic bags costing 15cents. Yay! “The National Treatment Purchase Plan”, oh would ya fuck off with that shite. Like a normal person would talk about that. Still the people in the video do appear to be totally natural unlike those in the Labour video where it was obvious they’re actors (though still kicking the ass of anyone on Fair City). All in all it felt like it was a video ad for a fitness gym because of the music, you just wanted it to end sooner.

Sorted Party on funding:

Sorted Party and the man on the street:

As party political broadcasts go, I think it is one of the best I’ve seen though this is the first of this election that I saw. More importantly I think Pat comes across as caring, considerate and genuine in it. Damnit, I’m even calling him Pat instead of Pat Rabbitte, as if he is a family friend or something. Suckered in? Very American style to the whole thing I must say, but it works. Not saying it means they get my vote though!

And also as gaeilge:

Well I never. Nice to see that I can watch Vincent Browne take Bertie to pieces on the official Noel Dempsey Blog:

And also nice to see I can watch Bertie get mauled on the Dragon’s Den too:

Perhaps the Video widget on the sidebar shouldn’t display any video that is tagged with Fianna Fail?

Meanwhile Noel shows a picture from his new movie “The Sound of Music 2: The Celtic Tiger”:

Keep reading.

Include the following words in the meeting that Tayto executives had with their “morkoting team” over their littering campaign. Viral. Dynamic. Guerilla. Paradigm. Long tail. Blawwg. Podcast. Bebo. MySpace generation. As a clever stunt it seems Tayto are running an ad campaign for a fake election candidate called Mr. Tayto. All well and good. Except…

Except only election candidates can put their posters on the poles. Commercial operators cannot. That did not stop Tayto putting their fake campaign posters on every pole in Ashbourne. See here. I’m hearing reports of other places too getting the same treatment.

Litter bugs! I’ll be calling the Ashbourne council in the morning to see will they be fining Tayto for each pole they littered on or is this allowed in the town or are the town getting a monetary contribution over this?

Edit: Despite Tayto telling the media that the posters are taken down in the evening, Mick took more pics which show they were still there at 10pm.

Or Katleennnnnnn as we say in Cork and what everyone refers to the Labour TD from North Central. I like the fact that they used the word “Mam” and not Mum. Like the other Labour videos it is a to-the-point piece on living in a “modern” Ireland. With all the other videos out there on YouTube now, it seems far too tame.

Found this on Robert Klausner’s blog, a picture of him and the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Check out what the t-shirt says:

The really awful video of David Hasselhoff being drunk and filmed by his daughter has been viewed at least 1.7 Million times already. It’s been aired on many TV networks too. I really despair at American news when instead of serious news, all outlets including CNN devote more and more time to Anna-Nicole, Britney, Paris, Prince William and now the Hoff.

This is the video:

But the interesting thing for me are all the parodies that are on YouTube such as this one:

So far there have also been about 200 video responses to the video.

The dozens of Irish piss-take videos around during the election show too that parody is alive and well in Ireland. Parody and satire seem to be a handy way of forking out into deeper more original creativity. The whole “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” comes to mind. First comes the derivatives of other work and then comes totally original pieces. Hell, Billy Shakespeare’s work got a lot of inspiration from other older stories. PoliticalThicko is getting a lot of attention for his videos but he is far from alone on that front. Bertie Ahern on Dragon’s Den was superb too.

I wish Labour and the other parties would release the raw footage they use to make their videos. It’d be great too to see RTE also release a lot of their own content online for free and to be reused. Neil Grogan has written to RTE asking them to release the political debates (if they bloody happen).

I am writing this email to ask you follow America’s CNN in releasing Irish Election broadcasts under a permissive license, like Creative Commons. This would allow people to reproduce the content freely, and give RTE the credit it deserves. Like Democracy, Culture wants to be free and open to the people. This could serve as a trial to Creative Commons licensing other RTE produced programs.

A great idea. I support it and it’d be great for all other political websites and organisations to ask the same of RTE. As Neil said, they can class this as a trial and maybe consider moving more original content online after that. Not in the god awful realvideo format either. RTE, like the Beeb, should get themselves a YouTube channel as well as a raw footage archive. Fergus Cassidy has also highlighted the CNN endeavour.

Roll on the parodies and roll on original art.