No, I didn’t say Flashmob, I said Flashback. Remember when Shmuel won the Israel in a Minute video contest for Nefesh B’Nefesh? That was soooo long ago. One of our favorite comedians, Benji Lovitt, sent me this article that he found (from 2007 – you must have really been searching a long time to find this one, Benji!) announcing Shmuel as the winner:
Not sure why they didn’t embed the video – and the NBN video contest page can no longer be found – but here’s the video:
When I get an extremely rare free moment, I like to watch Shmuel’s older videos to see how far he’s come. While he’s advanced on all technical levels, and comes up with cool new ideas for visuals, sound, graphics, story, etc., I’ve found that one thing stays the same: the excitement. His videos just don’t get boring. Even though he’s basically dealing with the same topic every time, more or less.
Check out this other Nefesh B’Nefesh video he made back then:
He must have learned from his classical training in viola how to take a theme and find its millions of variations.
For those who have been watching Shmuel’s videos from the beginning, and have shared this evolution with us, I just want to give you a heartfelt thanks for your continued viewing and support. And to give you something nostalgic on this rainy day.
Here’s the original post I wrote back then for the Aliyah on Campus video, with a bit about how he made it:
Read the full article on Why We Don’t Have Internet at Home Anymore here, and also check out the DaytoDisconnect video Shmuel shot for Gi Orman at BiG Productions and Ohr Naava:
You can read about how they made it here, and how I got 50 sites to embed the video or write about the campaign here.
How often do you get caught in the technology loop? Remember the ’90′s when we were just discovering email and chat? I’m sure we were all a bit slimmer and happier, strangely. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.
We announced a few weeks ago that we have $1,000 to give to one of the charities that hired Shmuel to make their video in 2011. We couldn’t decide to whom to give it, so we asked you.
The votes are in: you’ve decided on our fan page who your favorite charity is. Before we announce the winner, an organization that won with 304 votes, we want to give an honorable mention to the runner-up: NCSY, with 176 votes.
Shmuel helped Edan Pinchot record the music and the video in Chicago last year during a snow storm. He decided to combine Edan’s homemade version with his own studio footage, and some of the footage he took for the OU video last year.
John Lennon’s “Imagine” is the perfect song for describing what NCSY does. They reach kids who otherwise are pretty unconnected to Judaism, and provide them with a great time while they’re learning about their heritage. They help us imagine a world where people are connected to their past and use it as their strength. NCSY is bringing that imagined future into a reality.
Rock on, NCSY! Stay tuned for the first place winner of our $1,000 for Charity elections…
In the meantime, let us know what you think of the NCSY video by leaving a comment below. Thanks for voting!
The winner of the $1,000 will be posted in a few weeks – once the video is done!
Shmuel and I love helping charities get the word out about what they do. Besides watching our videos, getting involved, and donating, you now have a free way to help out the charity of your choice.
On our Facebook fan page, we’ve asked the question, “Who should get the $1,000?” The choices are some of the organizations who have hired Shmuel to make their videos this year.
Head to Shmuel’s fan page and cast your vote. In all honesty, all of these organizations deserve our donations. We couldn’t decide, so you get to.
Here are some of the nonprofit organizations for which Shmuel has made videos in 2011:
Michelle Hodkin, a new writer with an impressive Twitter presence, contacted me a few months ago about producing a book trailer ad for her new and first book The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer.
Mara Dyer, as we affectionately call the project, was published by Simon & Schuster, and a few months before the release, Michelle came to me because she wanted something that would really stick out, something exceptional, something no other book would have for their advertising.
Usually book trailers are cheaply made, with photographs or simple footage and little graphics and that’s it. Here our goal was to make something truly cinematic. We wanted to give the impression that this was actually a trailer for a movie. Michelle came up with the scenes and the script that she pulled out of her book. Aaron Grant from Kelvin Productions was our producer and did a fabulous job of holding all the different aspects of this production together. I don’t know how but somehow Michelle got an amazing casting director, Daryl Eisenberg. She was responsible for casting for TV shows like “Gossip Girl” and musicals like Altar Boyz. She did such an amazing job for finding us the cast. The idea was to have a style like in the Twilight Saga movies. But I didn’t want to just copy it. We went ahead and thought how can we make this truly unique.
The Mara Dyer story (which my wife calls “a thrilling page-turner”) tells the story of a highschool girl who was involved in a tragic accident in an abandoned insane asylum with a lecherous boyfriend and Mara’s best friend. In order to help her recover, her family moves to a different state and helps her start a new life. But her conscience slowly reveals what actually happened that night, along with a weird superpower that she didn’t know she had. It’s essentially a murder mystery written for a teenage audience,.
The ending is particularly great – it reveals so much but sets the reader up nicely to want to buy a sequel, which we hope will be written soon. So if you buy the book – don’t peek at the ending before you get there!
Mara Dyer kind of lives two lives, one the unconscious one and the other a “real” one. I wanted to have this expressed in our style. That’s why I decided to go with black and white and using color to distort the reality. Michelle expressed that she wanted parts of it to look a bit like The Blair Witch Project. So we shot the asylum scenes on our phones and small cameras to have it look self-made and gritty. It was very important that we got a mixture of mystery and sexy across for the teenage audience.
We had only two days of shooting booked and it was a challenge to shoot all the different scenes under the time constraint. But proper planning can make it happen. We shot in Central Park, in a NYC hotel and in a NYC studio. Thanks to Aaron’s planning, we got everything done in time. This would not have been possible without my great assistant Josh Fleisher who helped me throughout the shoot. Not only was he very forward-thinking but he helped me to clarify some ideas and contributed creatively to the shoot.
We shot everything on the Canon 7D and some scenes on the Panasonic Lumix LX5. We used gliders and steadicam for certain scenes. The thunderstorm scenes where done in Pennsylvania when I came across a fantastic rain-free thunderstorm. It was magic.
I’m reading right now Tim Ferriss book The 4-Hour Workweek. It’s so inspiring me to save more then 50% of my time. We waste a lot of time on being super unproductive. I have made a list of the most interesting things that I learned from the book, and I’ll apply them to my own workflow.
I want to do so much:
-making films
-writing blog posts
-spending quality time with my fam
-doing extensive research on marriage
A day just doesn’t have enough hours for me to complete everything. So here is my little secret how I manage it, and it has served me very well so far.
Here are my notes:
1. COLD CALLS - If you do have to make cold calls make them between 8-8.30am and 6-6.30 pm. You will usually
pass by the secretaries and get straight to the bosses and people in power for your goal to reach
2. TASK LISTS
- put the task list on paper, not in your computer, keep it in you pant pockets
- put on it two mission-critical items to complete for the day
3. DEADLINES
- create impossibly short deadlines to keep you super-focused. The less time you have the more you focus.
4. HOW TO READ 200% FASTER IN 10 MINUTES PRACTICE
1. 2min. use a pen and trace under each line as you read
2. 3min. focus from the third word beginning and ending the line to shorten eye movement (this optimizes peripheral vision)
3. 2min. just take two snapshots of each line and try to understand what you read. No long, continuous eye movements, just two snap shots
4. 3min. practice reading TOO fast with the above techniques
5. MEDIA DIET
Click here to buy the book now.
For five days stick to the following diet;
- NO news, magazines, audiobooks, radio
- NO pleasure watching, films etc.
- NO reading books
- NO websurfing unless its super necessary for the important work task
Now you’re wondering what to do with your time. Everything you’ve ever wanted to.
6. THE ART OF NOT FINISHING
-Don’t finish what you have begun to read, to watch.
-Stop whatever it is you’re doingif it doesn’t bring you closer to your big goals.
7. CHECKING EMAIL 2x A DAY
- check your email ONLY twice a day
- have an autoresponder saying:
“Thanks for you email.
Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to email twice daily.
If you require urgent assistance (please assure it is urgent) that cannot wait please contact me via phone at +1 646 770 1703.
Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness that helps me to accomplish more to serve you better.
Sincerely,
Shmuel Hoffman”
Have you read Ferriss’s book? What steps have you taken in order to save time?
I’m a gusher – emotional, excited. People will tell you how easily I cry.
And also how enthusiastic I am. I’ve written before about how I just love Shmuel’s film work and how I just love Tzipora Harris’s Clarity class (formerly the 40-day prayer class).
Well. Now, for the first time, here they are. Combined.
I just love the starkness. It gives you that feeling that you have when you’re alone with Gd. In a big, dark place, but also warm and held.
Okay, I’m sappy. Here’s how Shmuel improvised the set and lighting.
What do you think of the video? Let us know in the comments below. :-)
David Stahler from NCSY came to us in September and asked us if we could produce a piece for the OU that they would show at their conference in January. I asked him where he heard of us, and he said that Jeremy Joszef from Camp Morasha suggested us for this undertaking. He saw this video and was convinced that we would be the right ones to produce this challenging piece.
Why challenging? The OU is usually known as a Kashruth organization. But they run over 13 different programs that are financed by the kashruth revenues. Who knew that the OU has programs for disabled kids, are promoting the Jewish cause in Washington, helping married couples get on their feet, and helping the unemployed find jobs?The challenge was to convey all this in one little film and it had to be engaging, young, exciting, and short.
The biggest challenge of all was actually that the OU is not so popular among young people, besides for NCSY, and for their kosher certification. They asked us what we could do in order to make them look younger and more approachable to the youth of today.
We went back and forth with different ideas, between David, my wife Margelit, and myself. After a bit of research and bouncing different ideas around, my wife said to just throw in an “iPad”.
What did she mean?
“We use the iPad as an overall theme to tell the story,” she replied.
I was immediately intrigued. I’m an Apple user myself and I love to play with their design. Now I had to convince David to get the okay and I’m really thankful that he had enough trust in me to go forward with this idea without letting concerns and doubts get in our way.
I wrote the script combined with a storyboard. Usually script and storyboard are different entities. I wanted to simplify this process and decided to merge them both. It would also be easier for the client to not just have text to read – I wanted them to see our vision. So I added images to support the visuals. Here is our storyboardscript:
I can’t tell you how important it is to do proper and detailed pre-production, to write a script and think about the shots beforehand. It makes the filming and – even more so – the post-production, super easy. I think many undervalue this because they just tend to just jump into the project and start filming.
After the script was done and shown to the client they really liked the idea, and we went forward with planning all the shooting.
Many of the planned shots required steadicam work. I didn’t own a steadicam and had no experience. So I went ahead, bought a Glidecam 4000 with the vest and started practicing with this beast.
I tell you it’s not an easy thing to use. To get it right takes hours and days of practice. But I got this done for the project. I always try to find something new, something challenging, in every project, and I think to shoot major parts of this ad on a steadicam was quite challenging.
That’s the only way I learn: quickly.
When we conducted the interviews the interviewees were saying to me: I can’t say “I am the OU”. I guess they felt funny and didn’t know what this had to do with the OU film. But when they saw the final results and how it integrated smoothly, they were really amazed and surprised.
I think its abstraction in films & visuals that fascinates us. We don’t need to see how a thing is in reality. We are interested in how the thing inspires us in an orthogonal, non-linear way. I think that’s the challenge of every creative person.
The last challenge we faced was how to put all the faces into the iPads and iPhones. And I knew in the high – end commercial world they use greenscreen for this kind of work. So, I wasn’t sure how I could put a greenscreen onto it and then exchange it with real faces shots.
Do I have to buy green sticky paper and glue in on top of the devices? But then we would have no reflections on the the glass surfaces of the iPad.
Or should I display a green image that I scale up full screen into the iPad and by that I make sure that the glass reflections are preserved.
I had no clue. I turned to Eli Veffer, a friend and visual effects artist and discussed with him what I had to accomplish. And he suggested to go with just plain green images that we would display in the devices. He then would take that footage and would do a 3D track (in order to preserve motion on the Z-axis as well) and once we had the tracking data, we could exchange the green image with any image (in our case the faces) and the movement in the shots would be preserved by the inserted images as well.
I have to say, I have seen greenscreen work, and you can usually tell that it was done afterwords because the challenge is that the inserted image/footage has to move in the exact way that the camera moved in the shot. And often the two are off when the tracking of the movement is not done in a perfect way. The goal always is to create the illusion that the device and the faces are shot at the same time.
Here’s the final ad:
It was very well received. In fact many new clients asked us to do a film for them when they saw what is possible.
I LOVE the OU and its staff. They are really great people and I really enjoyed just hanging out with them, learning about kashruth and their programs. I bugged them with a lot of questions especially about food supervision.
Special thanks to David Stahler who had the trust and courage to go ahead and support us in this. Thanks to David Olivestone, David Frankel, and Rabbi Weil for the trust that you had in us to make a fun and YOUNG film. And finally thanks to Olivia Friedman who helped us tremendously in putting this together and staying on schedule.
I’m constantly thinking about how to be more creative, more inspired how to communicate ideas clearly. It’s not always easy. We have boundaries, financial limits, client preferences, what our audience will accept, and what they won’t. I came accross this site that inspired me to write about this. Have a look: http://www.youtube.com/user/Ogilvy
I think that’s the right approach. Struggle is part of the creative process. We try to present ourselves as creative and full of ideas. But in the end, it’s always a struggle with myself and I admit it. Is this interesting what I’m producing, is it relevant? Am I doing it for the money or just for pleasing my clients? I think it’s from everything a bit.
We are afraid of failing, of making mistakes. But only our mistakes guide us to where we want to see ourselves. I want to break out of this fear. I have the drive for doing this, but do I have the guts?
I see so much on the web, other people’s work, and am impressed. I want to do these things. Do what everybody is inspired by. What’s your view is on creativity? Are you struggling? How do you get inspired? What makes a person creative?
I just translated parts of a book about a furniture designer Wharton Esherick who made interior designs. That inspired me tremendously. His art work is influenced by the anthroposophical movement, and he drew most of his inspiration out of that. It reminds me that I learned to look into other fields beyond just my own, and totransfer ideas and concepts into my own creativity rather then looking always to the work of other filmmakers.
What do you think of all this? The more we discuss the more we can learn from each other. Write your opinion in the comments below.
BTW, I really really appreciate that you’re here with us and sharing your stuff with us.
Here is our latest video that we produced for the Aish Center in New York. It was very challenging to come up with a new idea since Aish wanted to communicate basically the same things that they did in last year’s video, and from the video we made for them the year before that.
I was looking for a solution for quite a while. How to make an institution like Aish visually interesting was really the main challenge. So the idea was to conduct the interviews with Aish participants at different locations in NYC and have the atmosphere play a part and role in this video. We organized around 25 interviews in front of 25 different sights in Manhattan. We filmed during daytime and nighttime.
The challenge then became the sound. The outside noise was very noticeable during the interviews. In post-production I added more city noise in order to have it match with the footage and to give it an acoustic feel.
I think it was a great idea to include the marriage part. That added another dimension and made it more personal. It gives an idea of who the people are and what they personally gained by going to Aish.
Here is our first commercial that we produced for a jewelry store on the luxurious Holland – Amercia cruise ships. Everything was shot on a Canon 7D, mostly with a Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens. Thanks for the entire team and the generous help of the client Shawn Hakimian to make this commercial possible. We learned a lot about the pre planing, the production, and the post production.
Interesting was how the commercial from the script writing process to the finalization went through multiple stages and changes. We started actually with a story of the couple throughout the day on the cruise ship featuring the jewelry of the client. When we got on location the weather was anything else then ideal. The commercial required beautiful sunshine, a going ship on the sea and footage of the couple waking up, sun-bathing etc. (see script). But because it was raining on that day (and believe me we were monitoring the weather for two weeks) we were very limited of shooting all the scenes we wanted to feature. But in the end, as you might know me a bit I love to work in an improvised manner and so did I on this piece. I think as long as you are flexible, plan well and then deal with all the things that can happen its a guaranty for success.
I really want to thank everybody on the team, starting with Shawn and his mother Betty who were a very generous and pacient client. I want to say thank you to Ron for the great script writing process, Robin for being so pacient with me on the casting the actors, Sara for making the actors beautiful, for Tony and Ozem and their great performance.
This video holds a special place in my heart. As I wrote in my post for last year’s Aish Center NY video, the Aish Center in NY played a big role in my becoming religious and moving to Israel. It’s always exciting for me to hear of the amazing people who have changed their lives for the better thanks to Aish, and the awesome things they are doing with the newfound sense of purpose that some of the classes give them. Aren’t these class titles so compelling?
-RQ: Relationship Quotient
-JSAP: the Jewish Social Action Project
-Inner Paradise Workshop
Just to name a few.
I actually wrote a script for this video before we began production. As my father always says, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” But of course, the reality of filming a documentary promotional video is that you cannot script it. One thing I admire about Shmuel is that he’s not sentimental about anything in the process, so if the script isn’t working, he tosses it, or if a great shot just doesn’t fit the edit, he cuts it. He has perfected the art of trimming the fat.
And I absolutely love the time-lapse shots. They really capture the feeling of New York and its daily cycles. When I see that train shot and the chugging music comes in, I’m reminded of when I first moved to NY, and I went to a party. I was worried about leaving on time to catch the last train. “You’re not in Boston anymore, honey,” said a friend of mine. “This city never sleeps, and neither does the subway.”
I mentioned to Shmuel when I saw the footage that he should film a cooking show–don’t the cooking scenes just make you hungry?
See if you can catch Shmuel’s cameo appearance in this one.
Everyone has been excited about the change that Obama’s being elected is expected to bring to the world, especially regarding environmental policy. I’m all for the environment—I first started keeping Shabbat when I read that if the whole world wouldn’t drive for a day, the ozone layer would heal itself. “Hey,” I thought. “There is a day like that when people don’t drive, and it happens once a week!” This movie highlights a new environmental policy whose effects were clearly not thought-out beforehand.
As we know, California produces one third of the US’s produce. A dramatic drop in crops could mean a dramatic change in America’s diet, as well as the price of produce, and this at a time when affording groceries is getting harder and harder throughout the world.
Shmuel made this video through MaxFilms, our beloved friends Michael Fenenbock and Daphne Weisbart of the 18 and of www.denukeiran.com. Their client, Jim Costa, a California Congressman, wanted a movie made that documented the struggles of his constituents in the current food and farming crisis in California. This movie was shown to President Obama in order to get him to revoke the policy that brought this crisis about.
Shmuel used some new exciting techniques to get the look he wanted. One was the SmoothCam feature that he used to steady the camera in the aerial shots. Another is called Optical Flow, which made the slow-motion shots look like still photos.
The coolest thing for me was when he showed me how he made the color effects during the slow-mo shot of the marchers. If you see the original, and then this, you really get to understand how much work and thought Shmuel puts into making everything just right. Perfection and precision is what you get when you’re dealing with a German Jew!
At the beginning of 2008, Shmuel spent three months working in the Old City in Aish’s media building with Rabbi Shore. We hardly saw him, he was working so much. One of the main projects he completed in that time was Zero Point Three Per Cent, a piece inspired by my uncle Dani Schneor’s “Sorry” commercial that he made for the pensioneers in Israel.
Uncle Dani has been a cinematographer and DP in Israel and abroad for years. His commercial showreel and his movie work are just awesome. He’s one of Shmuel’s mentors in the business, and his wife Brit, my aunt, brings such energy to any conversation; we love visiting them in their home behind the nature preserve in the north.
Shmuel worked closely with R. Nechemia Coopersmith to make Zero Point Three Per Cent, one of his most talked about pieces. The most important part of Shmuel’s work is that he’s passionate about his message. He doesn’t just work for money. He works for the love of Jews and the goal of bringing peace of world to fruition. And the only way this can happen is for Jews to unite. Let the bickering end so that we can stand up to our enemies united. The whole world wants to kill us, why should we fight over anything at all?
Now is the time to stand together. This has to begin in the home, with those closest to us, and it ripples out from there. I may not be able to influence political decisions (then again, maybe I can!), but I can at least say a kind word to my husband and do him an extra favor. The cost is zero and the reward is astounding.
That’s what this video is about, in so many words.
Midreshet Moriah is a post-high-school, modern Orthodox seminary for girls in Jerusalem. Shmuel’s made promo videos for seminaries before, but none like this. He wanted to create a new, modern visual association to accompany such an ancient topic as Torah learning. The result is an exciting, fresh approach that I think you’ll just love–because I do!
With each new production, Shmuel teaches himself more, pushes his limits, and brings it to the next level. This time he took his inspiration from fashion advertising, which is always on the cutting edge, because you can’t be 5 minutes ago in fashion. Giving a nod to the online world that most high school students – frum or otherwise – are familiar with, the concept for Shmuel’s animation in this video is appropriate for how so many of us get our Torah fix these days: on the internet.
But, our oral tradition is just that – oral – and despite getting great inspiration from online Torah sources, there’s no replacement for the sem/yeshiva experience, as Shmuel and I can attest. That’s what I love about being Jewish: being part of an ancient nation in modern times gives us access to the best of the old world and of the new.
Working with Rachel Slovin, the Berglases and Rabbi Mayer was a pleasure, and Evyatar Katz kept our Hebrew on its toes with his quick sense of humor! We had such a good experience with Midreshet Moriah; we hope this video brings them much success!
Now, after almost two months of production I’m posting this commercial. Ami Tamir, the founder of Jooz.Tv was impressed by my work and wanted something different then he would usually get from others. So he browsed through our work and asked for a commercial that has a look and feel like ‘NY’s People‘ but with a website animation like in the Moriah promo we did a year ago.
So we shot the thing in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem asking people in the street what they think for them is love, spirituality, friendship etc. It was very interesting how differently people responded so differently. I wanted to capture their faces and their immediate surrounding that we would find them in. A face speaks so many languages. That was one reason I didn’t want to show the people actually talking. It would have taking away from the magic of this facial language. Humans focus very much on human faces and eyes and what they express. The goal was to attract secular people to Jooz.Tv in order to have them brows through dozens of videos that bring up discussion and ask questions about what spirituality is and why we are here.
I used for this production my Canon 7D camera and a 50mm 1.4 lens in order to get a shallow depth of field. I think its important that the viewer is able to focus entirely on the face with as little distraction as possible from the background. The timelaps shots were done with a zoom lens and my favorite compact camera the Panasonic Lumix LX3.
I was looking actually for some music but returned to a piece of music from my beloved band Sigur Ros from Iceland. I edited the music so it would fit the climatic feeling that it builds towards the end. I think I used four different songs throughout the clip and cut them together. As you know music for me is very important and I think I benefited very much from my former classical music education.
If you like Sigur Ros’ music you can get it here.
Shtar Music Video by Shmuel Hoffman. Watch it in full HD here
Life has been very crazy. Moving to the US and planing everything related to it, finishing up other projects, planing the new ones here and in the US and finally Pesach preparation.
But finally we got the music video done. Here it is. My very first one and I’m a bit proud of it because I didn’t know how it would come out. I admit its a bit simple but I wanted to test the waters. Now I feel much more confident to do more and crazier ones.
I shot this entirely on the Canon 7D in a little self made studio. About the post production process I wrote here.
Selfmade studio in the town hall of Beit Shemesh
It was amazing to work with the Shtars. Thanks guys again for having had so much trust in my abilities to do this. It was amazing how much Brad, Ori and I were on the same page when we edited the final together. What a fun experience. Thanks guys again that you were so patient with me.
I filmed 3 years ago in Mea Shearim, in the most religious neighborhood in Jerusalem for nearly 6 months for my own project. I have been always fascinated by this neighborhood not only because the people over there preserve a lifestyle that is hundreds of years old but also because of its controversy that it generates in Israeli society in particular and in the worldwide media in general. I was always curious who are these people over there behind their ‘black & white’ lifestyle.
One thing that was very surprising to me is when I heard how many filmmakers and TV crews tried actually to film in this neighborhood and were thrown out and sometimes severely hurt by the people because the people in Mea Shearim don’t like film crews to come into their neighborhood.
I don’t know why, but I was very well accepted overthere with my little Panasonic DVX 102 camera. They kind of saw me as their own and therefore I had a tremendous access into that world. I followed along with a Rabbi who showed me around in the neighborhood and gave me deep access to dozens of people and families. The plan was to make a full feature documentary. I funded this project so far on my own but unfortunately I was not able to continue with this project because of lack of funds. I approached several producers and people in the industry but I guess its something challenging to excite other producers about this topic.
Its a shame because its a very rare and unique situation that I have this access and trust of these people to get close to them and to be able to film them.
5 Ways for Businesses & Nonprofits to Use Pinterest - I joined Pinterest probably over a year ago to collect my favo... http://t.co/8brdFDie18 hours ago
. It’s so inspiring me to save more then 50% of my time. We waste a lot of time on being super unproductive. I have made a list of the most interesting things that I learned from the book, and I’ll apply them to my own workflow.
