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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Online promotional videos for dentists are the new rage in America, and with good reason: Who’s not afraid of going to the dentist? Now I can “get to know” my dentist online via video before stepping foot into his/her office. It makes me feel secure and more confident about whose face I’ll be breathing into while I lay vulnerable on the dental chair.
And, starting now, it’s the new rage in Israel. After thoroughly enjoying his shoot at the KJJ dental office on Keren HaYesod in Jerusalem, Shmuel suggested I switch my provider and get my teeth cleaned there. I did, and have not looked back since. The reception staff was so helpful when I had to reschedule my cleaning twice, the hygienist was super-nice, and my teeth felt cleaner than they ever have when she was through. The dentists tell really funny jokes–you can catch one at the end of the video. That’s how they get their patients to open their mouths: with laughter!
I love the great shots of the equipment that Shmuel took, with that powerful white light in the background that he created afterward in post-production. He really knows how to cut the clutter out of the frame. As I wrote before: he’s a Yekke and he likes things clean!
Tal Ben-Shahar is the hippest Harvard professor you’ll ever learn from. His classes on positive psychology are the most popular and well attended in the history of Harvard. Yes, he has his PhD in Organizational Behavior and his BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Harvard. But the specifics of what he teaches come from a source that long pre-dates Freud: the Torah.
But you don’t have to go to Harvard to get the goods. His classes are available at aishcafe.com, and Shmuel made the promo for it. If you’re still not convinced to take this life-changing class, watch the video!
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