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 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.
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!
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.
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