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:
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!
There have been so many awesome Channukah videos this year. When Ohel’s Director of Marketing, Derek Saker, approached Shmuel about producing this video, they decided not to compete. What they came up with is a completely different take on the meaning of Channukah.
Sorry, I should have warned you to whip out the tissues beforehand.
But isn’t that what Chanukah’s all about? We can do anything! We can beat the Greeks, even when there are so many more of them than us, and they have all the military power.
This is what’s so inspiring about Ohel. When Shmuel made the Camp Kaylie video, it was so clear to me that what Ohel creates is a new, better world, even if it’s just on their campus. What I’ve learned from Ohel is that if I want to bring light to this world, I have to start small, with the people in my life. When you catch those pockets of ideality on video, the light spreads like wildfire to all who watch.
So here’s some light for you. Pass it on.
Happy Hannukah. And can someone tell me what the correct English spelling for Chanukah is, if there is one?
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:
The only kosher place in town is at a local college. Shmuel and I go there for lunch sometimes. We notice how disabled students are usually alone, while their nondisabled counterparts eat together in groups.
One of the things that struck me so much when I was becoming religious was how, in religious communities, developmentally disabled people get married, maybe have kids, and are integrated into the everyday family life of the community. I haven’t seen this anywhere else.
Shmuel made this video for Camp Kaylie, Ohel’s awesome integrated summer camp. The camp integrates typically developing kids and developmentally disabled kids, and the result is just beautiful. He’s finishing up a second video for the camp – coming soon – that shows the awesome activities they do. But more than that, it shows how they become best friends and don’t even remember who’s DD and who’s typical.
8th Day, the band who wrote Ya’alili, graciously allowed Camp Kaylie to rewrite the words to their song and to make this video out of it. It’s such a catchy tune. We’re happy our work has helped Camp Kaylie promote the awesome work it does.
Thanks to Gi Orman at BiG Productions for working on this with us, and to Derek Saker at Ohel for the opportunity to make this awesome video!
What do you think of it? Leave your comments below.
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.
Gi Orman of BiG Productions came to me and asked me if I would like to become a part of a super exciting project: Encouraging people to get off their mobile phones and other electronic devices for at least an hour in order to connect to family and friends without any internet and email interuption.
I couldn’t be more thrilled about such a project as you can imagine. Especially since I’m such a BEFUERWORTER for using email and phone responsibly and getting rid of our internet at home as you can read about HERE.
Here’s the video:
Gi Orman showed me a commercial from Asia that inspired him and the whole DaytoDisconnect team and asked me to be responsible for the visual look and feel as a cinematographer and colorist. We sat together and carved out the scenes first, discussed locations and actors. One important part was that we wanted some special effects that show the absence of the people in various scenes. The idea was to show that when you are emailing in the middle of a date with your spouse its as if your spouse is not there anymore. Or if you are playing with your children and texting at the same time, the children miss the presence of their father.
I think there couldn’t be a better time to produce such a video. We live in a time when everybody is on email, on Facebook, on the web. I think our real life human interactions have dramatically decreased. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology and embrace it. I just stand up for using it responsibly and I make sure that my wife and my children are always first before an email or another tweet ; )
Back to the production. In order to show the absence of people we wanted to have book pages turning, shopping carts being pushed, cups being held without the actual people present doing this in order to symbolize the loneliness. Many of you have asked how you guys did it and honestly I can’t take credit for it. It’s the genius of Elliot Christ who is the editor and graphics artist at BiG Productions and he and Gi are making all that magic happen. We basically put all the ‘flying’ parts on fishwires and filmed it with a lock down camera, then we took it out of the frame and filmed it again without the props. In post production Elliot merged the two images together and cut out with a mask the fishwires for a realistic effect.
Now, the shopping carts were a bit more down to earth done. We just had two guys on the floor moving the shopping carts and I chose a framing of the image so that you couldn’ts see them.
Early in the production process the Disconnect team brought Charlie Harary in for co – directing together with Gi Orman. I know Charlie for a while and it was so much fun to work with both together. Believe me, we made a lot of jokes going on and got the whole team cracking up ; )
Editing, special effects and graphics were done by BiG Productions. I was responsible for the color grading, one of my favorite specilties.
In terms of the look I wanted a highly stylized look. As you can see when the people were playing with their iPhones and Blackberry’s I color graded it in mute colors to emphesize the loneliness they are creating. When they realize the absence of their families and friends and turn off their phones I oversaturated the colors and shifted them towards the color spectrum of the sun light in order to give it a more vivid and happy feeling because they are now connecting with each other. Its important for me to express emotions through colors and amplify a certain feeling that I want my audience to experience.
It was a great campaign that in the end had hundreds of thousands of hours of disconnection pledged. Thanks to Ohr Naava for bringing this awareness to the forefront.
It’s a conference where venture capitalists listen to startups give their pitches, and where they decide who’s getting the funding.
Normally if an entrepreneur wants to get in and schmooze, it does take a monetary investment. But we’re partnering with YoungStartup to give away a free ticket to next week’s summit.
For a chance to win**, comment on this blog post with your name, the name of the business you’re looking to fund, and your idea, or some hint of it if you want to keep it a secret.
Looking forward to seeing the kinds of cool stuff you’re up to!
We hope to announce the winner by Friday, July 15th** so you can have time to plan your trip to NY!
May the best idea win!
**Update: This contest is now closed. We hope to announce the winner by Sunday, July 17, 2011. Thank you for your patience!
[We interrupt our poring over the newly released Final Cut Pro X to bring you this video.]
Although we primarily live Stateside now, Shmuel still does video work for clients in Israel. Here’s his latest:
A few years ago Shmuel made both a commercial for Pardes, and a longer promotional video. Both were very well received and helped Pardes with recruitment, so they came back to Shmuel for this video.
Pardes is putting the cool back in teaching. Since I watched Shmuel create this project, I’m seriously considering coming back to Israel just to join the Pardes Educator’s Program (PEP). Will keep you posted on that one.
We cannot stress enough what a pleasure it is to work with Louise Szcerb, Director of Communications at Pardes, and Yehudit Singer, who has been indispensable to nonprofits the whole time we’ve known her. It was also very cool to get feedback from Tom Barad, a Hollywood producer on the Pardes board. Not to mention to be inspired by his awesome wife Jill who paved the way for the rest of us women in business as the head of Mattel for many years.
But I digress. Anyway, what do you think of the video?
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.
This OU video was a lot of fun to make. It is Shmuel’s debut as a steadicam operator. I was so impressed with how quickly he picked up what is known to be quite a difficult and physically challenging task. He’s worked with a glider before (see the great pool-diving shot in this video), but a steadicam takes a lot of skill. I think he nailed it.
I say this video was a lot of fun to make, but I’m not the one who made it, of course. For me the fun part was hanging out with NCSY at their winter retreat in Connecticut, then spending New Year’s in Teaneck… see if you can catch cameos of me and the kids in this one. :-)
The OU is such an awesome organization, and I wouldn’t have known how amazing it is if Shmuel hadn’t made this video. I feel like I’m part of something phenomenal when I buy anything with an OU hechsher. See for yourself in the video above.
How do you like the iPad theme? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. :-)
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.
Jooz TV Commercial in HD here
Its been a long time, I know. We finally arrived safely in America and are very happy so far to be here.
With three children it was easier then we thought. All five of us are living in one room together, no joke. On top of all that my office is in the same space as well. But we manage. That reminds me of one story:
Once a man came to a Rabbi and asked what he should do in order to have peace with his wife. The Rabbi answered: ‘Move with your family into one room for three months and then move back’.
Thats exactly what we are doing right now.
Thanks to my in-laws who took us into there not very big house we were able to put everything together in order to start a life here.
In the meantime I have worked on a couple of projects right now. One of them is a image film about Chai Lifeline, an organization that takes care about cancer children. We worked in conjunction with the NY based company Big Productions, founded by Gidon Orman. It was challenging since we had a very limited amount of time for filming the scenes. In the end it all worked out. I will post the video soon here.
In the meantime my Tokina 11-16 f2.8 lens arrived and I promised you to give you an update. I waited for this piece of gear for over two months. Its sold out everywhere and I’m lucky that I got one.
This 30s commercial you see above was done after a request from Ami Tamir, the founder of Jooz TV. He wanted to have something super short to tease people to go to his site and check out the other movies. Here is his site.
Jerusalem’s People
A propos site. I have redone my site. Here it is: www.ShmuelHoffman.com
Have a look. I changed the design and the UI quite a bit. I hope its easier and even more exciting to browse through our video clips.
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.
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