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:
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.
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.
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.
Gidon Orman from Big Productions NY, one of the most successful video production companies in the US for Jewish videos came half a year ago to me and asked me if I would be interested in working with him on a couple projects together. Of course I was interested and one project was a video for the fundraising dinner of the One Israel Fund.
We toured for three days throughout the country and interviewed different people and how The One Israel Fund effected their lives. It was amazing to see and experience how many people are actually devoting their time, their efforts and lives to live in the periphery so that we can have a homeland: Eretz Israel. The One Israel Fund is helping out with security equipment like cameras, night vision glasses, financial aid for security and first-response equipment to just mention a few of the manyfold things The One Israel Fund is doing.
For this particular project I worked as a DP and I used my Canon 7D. The post production was done by Big Productions in NY. The final cut includes the majority of what we have filmed together in these three days but Gidon also used shots from previous footage and news material.
I love working with Gidon. Its always fun and we really inspire each other with ideas and methods, we meet new people and have a lot of fun together.
I think this experience was also the kick-off for a longer working relationship to produce and create more videos together.
When we’ll move to NY we will work on a couple of other projects and I’m really looking forward.
Why Video Testimonials?
2010 will be the year of the video. I for-see ( and I’m not alone) that video will see an explosion in the online market place. People are not reading web content any more (at least not the majority). If text competes with a movie play button then the mouse pointer is certainly faster on clicking the movie button then the eye is catching the first written lines of the text.
Especially testimonials are crucial because people want to see what other ‘customers’ have to say. We believe them more then a written or an audio testimonial. Such a video like the above is very cost effective and can be produced in 1-2 days like we did. Now back to our Tiferet production.
Eli Mayer from the Tiferet girls school in Beit Shemesh called me up three days ago:
‘Shmuel, we have an emergency. Tomorrow we have a Chanukat HaBait (building dedication) and we have left some money. I need you to make a video for recruiting. We would like to make this as cutting edge, fast paced, awesome and high tech as possible. We would like to get across, high energy, fun and that the girls are happy and loving Tiferet.’
The only challenge was he needed the video within three days. Wait, wait, ‘cutting edge’, ‘high tech’, ‘fast paced’ in three days?? Sure. No problem. I said ok. Next day I went out shooting the Chanukat HaBait at the Tiferet school. What an amazing experience. It was so easy to work with the girls and thank G-d that they had the energy we needed in order to fulfill Eli’s requirements. I didn’t need even to push, I rather had to calm them a bit down. They are so friendly and have amazing midot they truly love the school. It must be a very special place.
Next day I started editing. My wife helped me a lot to get the first steps of organizing the interview footage (thank you so much, wouldn’t have done it without you) because I’m still in the middle of the Jooz.Tv project. After that step I pulled off a story, finding music, color correct everything, sweetening the sound and upload to YouTube.
The whole piece was shot on the Canon 7D. I was a bit disappointed with the b-roll footage. Didn’t come out as I wanted. I think the interview part is nice and I can do my favorite jump cuts since the image size that the 7D delivers is HUMONGOUS. I still have to learn what lenses to use for the b-roll till I get better imagery. I suspect that its always better to use a narrow lens for crowd shots and using the shallow depth of field in order to ‘organize’ the shot. If you have other tips for shooting proper b-roll in a run & gun situation, let me know.
Maybe you’ve heard about the unwanted down syndrome babies who are left in hospitals after they’re born. I’ve never been in that situation, so I am not one to judge. But you cannot deny that this is heartbreaking.
In my parenting class taught by Rebbetzin Leora Silberg, we learned the Adlerian theory of raising children, which says that, besides food, clothing and shelter, children need one main thing: a sense of belonging. To one person. Like, let’s say, a mother. There have been studies done (says Rbtzn Silberg) that show that babies thrive when one main person cares for them, and that they don’t when caregivers (say, a hospital staff, no matter how caring) are on shift.
Enter Lamed Vuvnik (pronounced “Lah-med Vav-nik”). Besides finding homes for these abandoned special needs babies (with the help of the Derech Elokim Fund) Lamed Vuvnik addresses the exact needs of Israel’s poor: clothing children in winter, feeding familes, and providing double strollers for mothers who, like me, have babies close in age, so that they can breathe some fresh air once in a while. This may sound trivial, but any mother of small children knows that being stuck at home all day can be torture.
Keep a lookout for me in this one: We happen to have bought the same double stroller that Lamed Vuvnik gives its recipients, the Graco Duoglider, so Shmuel filmed me pushing it with Moishe and Israel enjoying the ride.
Shmuel made this movie with David Coleman, whom he met when he filmed for Torah Encounters, which is another video I have to post one of these days.
Enjoy! And please, the next time you come to Israel, bring a double stroller with you. When I no longer need mine, I hope to give it a good washing and donate it to Lamed Vuvnik.
What can I say, I wish I went to Nishmat! It makes learning so amazing. The first time I heard about Nishmat, I went to R. Weisberg’s Chanukah shiur that he held in NYC at a friend’s house. It was full of exciting midrash, halachah, and gemara, and it was just magical. Since then, I’ve made quite a few Nishmat friends; all of them are sharp and fun, and they’re relaxed in every situation except when it comes to keeping mitzvahs!
I love this look, the simple portrait on a white background. Shmuel had been experimenting with it ever since the 18 videos, and here in the Nishmat video I feel it’s perfected. He used two cameras and crazy angles to get the varied look that creates movement in what could be an otherwise static setup.
My favorite detail in Shmuel’s work is that his shooting follows his subject, both in emotion and in what they say. Check out how he zooms with the subjects breathing and sentence phrasing. This is why you can’t bother Shmuel when he’s working—he’s very, very focused!
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
