I shot John Cleese—I’m a camera man, that’s what I do.

Recently I was fortunate enough to travel down to Santa Barbara with Vinvin and Dean Whitbread to interview John Cleese. I was immediately excited, after all my mom raised me on Monty Python. Growing up, if I stayed home sick from school, she would rent me Marx Brothers or Monty Python, which eventually led me to love Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I digress. After a nice road trip down from San Francisco, during which I slept in the backseat most of the way, we ended up in Santa Barbara, and eventually at John Cleese’s cottage. This visit was just to scout what we would be shooting the next day.

Day 2, the day I shot John Cleese, we spent about 4 hours at his house on an interview, a tour of the house, and finally a conversation on Seesmic. By far my favorite part was the interview, in which John spent most of his time bashing Sarah Palin and endorsing Obama.

When I heard Mr. Cleese talking about politics, and found myself both laughing and thinking hard about what he was saying, it immediately dawned on me that this footage of him had to get online as quickly as possible. Not because I think John Cleese is going to make anyone change their mind about who to vote for, but because I think it will help inspire other people to be more active in the campaign. The thing that struck me most about what he said is that the US has made itself look so bad in the last eight years, particularly in re-electing George Bush. He said the international world looks at us completely different than it used to but that in a single day, with a snap of the finger and a single vote, we can change how the world perceives us.

To me this is one of the most important points of the upcoming election: the perception of the outside world. We live in a modern global society, and if you don’t think how we are perceived by the rest of the world matters to nearly everything that has to do with us internally, I think you may need a reality check.

I’ll move on.

So the first thing that we made when we got back to San Francisco was a short clip of John Cleese talking about Sarah Palin. In 24 hours the had received more than 10,000 hits on YouTube—this is when we decided it was time to start editing a longer version of John Cleese on US politics. I knew full well that the longer version would have a harder time taking off—first people would think it was the video they had already seen and second it seemed like the moment had passed. Nonetheless, the video went up and about a week later has a little over 24,000 hits.

Being a part of a video that goes viral online is pretty fun. I saw the Diggs Climb (Digg is a place where you can vote if you like a video, blog post, photo, or just about anything online), I saw it on people’s blogs, and my favorite was seeing it on the Huffington Post and Comedy Central’s blog. I think the reason it’s fun to see it get big is knowing that a ton of eyeballs are watching an interview that I shot, Jeremey edited, and Vinvin hosted.

Here is a quick rundown of some of the web pages on which the video was mentioned, or where you could see it posted.

1. Election 2008 on Twitter: John Cleese at the top of the tag cloud.
2. The Huffington Post: an article about the video.
3. Reddit: eventually made it to the top
4. Comedy Central’s blog featured an article
5. 3rd on Digg, eventually made it to the top of Digg. Last I looked the video had 6813 Diggs.
6. YouTube: most viewed of the day and the week. Last I looked the video had 967,115 hits.
7. Boing Boing: probably gave the video it’s first boost.