Genius!
Posted by David Hepworth on 13 May 2008 - 8:36am.
Maximum marks for enterprise to The Get Out Clause for getting the local councils and police authorities of Britain to shoot the video for their single. They turned up and mimed in front of various traffic cams and then demanded access to the footage under the Freedom Of Information Act. Neat.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
- More from David Hepworth.
- Login or register to post comments
That's three brilliant, inventive things
this blog has thrown up in the last few days, including those great Go Home Productions remixes (which livened up a long drive yesterday) and the Radioshred clip (which would be funny enough just watching Thom Yorke's little dance). I might have to renew my subscription.
Reader of the week
Help yourself to a prize.
Freeloading wastrels.
That's tax-payer's money they're misappropriating to fund their inane videos. They should all be doing proper work, or in the army. I hope their parents are proud of them. What sort of left-wing drivel have their teachers taught them? How to sponge? 50 seconds in, one poor driver kept waiting at a zebra crossing finally snaps and drives forward. No doubt if he'd hit one of these idiots he'd have been judged the one to blame. The whole country's gone to the dogs.
I don't believe this story; they've just faked up CCTV and invented the FOI angle in an attempt to look hip 'n' groovy.
A Likely Story
So that‘s traffic cam footage is it? And such footage can be obtained under the Freedom Of Information Act and used for commercial purposes can it? Nonsense.
Crap song too.
Likely?
I'm not sure it matters. You can certainly obtain such CCTV footage (a friend of mine obtained a video of his own mugging). And no, you're not supposed to use the footage for commercial purposes, but I doubt anyone would take action against you in a case like this. It's a good story whether it's true or not.
Agree with you about the song, though.
Ah, but
there's a big difference between a mugging with an associated Crime Number, and just mugging like crazy in front of your mate's Camcorder.
True
But you don't need to supply a crime number to obtain such footage under the FOI act, as far as I know. You don't even have to explain why you want it. If the information is held by a public authority, they must consider releasing it.
I don't believe there's anything to stop the Get Out Clause doing precisely what they claim to have done. Whether they actually did is another matter altogether, but either way it's a pretty good story.
i think the position is that
if a government agency/authority holds data on you, to include photographic data then, within certain parameters, you are entitled to a copy of it.
Er, but
I don't believe this has anything to do with the FOI (the story talks about companies, not public authorities) and I don't think you can ask for CCTV images under the DPA. So I reckon there's every possibility that they didn't do precisely what they claim to have done, but that they've just made it look like they might have done so.
It could be a work of art
worthy of Warhol but
1. While most of the footage I'd reckon is genuine CCTV some of it obviously isn't - most of the closer shots (especially of your man singing), the one that travels up an escalator with them and the ground level shots (like the cars by the zebra crossing) for example. And...
2. As previously noted, the song is woefully dreary with none of the spark that this enterprise might suggest.
Shame that.
Apparently they performed in front of 80 cameras in Manchester but were only given tapes from 20 of them.
And maybe it's more enterprising than we thought: the page about the video on their myspace site has a sponsored link for CCTV and burglar alarm systems!