This video had my class rolling with laughter – it’s slightly NSFW (mainly with the cussing in the subtitles, although if your office has Russian speakers, they might object).

This is the mayor of Kharkov, and he was trying to record a TV campaign commercial, but couldn’t manage to string enough coherent words together to spit out a sentence. Apparently, he’s notoriously stupid – “The Sarah Palin of Ukraine” – and is the subject of much mockery & head-shaking.

I was particularly impressed by the torrent of expletive-laced abuse hurled at this guy by the director (who we see in some of the early shots). I think this must have come at the end of an exhausting filming session, because the director is just going off on him in a way that would put Joe Pytka to shame.

Gems include: “Try to have an expression. Come on, at least try. Let’s go, let’s go.” “Misha, stop this crap.  Really, stop it.”

D: “Why the fuck did you take your hand away?
M:”I finished?”

D: “So fucking what. You finished! Sit one second, motherfucker. OK, we have to do this all over again. From the top…”

D: “Your face is boring. Nobody is going to give you any money.”

Please, can anyone out there who has access to the footage of Palin campaign commercial filming post the outtakes to the web? Because I think the wolf-shootin’ turky-genocidin’ Caribou Barbie must’ve had sessions like this.  Then again, maybe she had the offending directors fed to polar bears.

The fog, wet pavement, and industrial setting made me feel like I was in some kind of remake of "The Third Man."

The assignment here is to teach a group of newspaper reporters how to shoot, edit and post video.  I’m also going to take a morning to teach them about some of the emerging ad models on the web, since so many of the problems attendant to online video have to do with the uneven schemes for monetizing this kind of content.

I’m on an internet connection here that is a bit iffy, so I’m going to experiment with a gallery plug-in that may or may not get me marked as a spammer, as well as uploading the shots.  So bear with this experiment, and there should be more eye-candy goodness as the week progresses.

Schipohl Airport is starting to become familiar to me.