Sunshine is not always best when it comes to filming

Most producers try to keep costs down by doing the entire shoot on one long and intense day, and minimizing the crew involved. Sometimes, a complex shoot runs into an extra day. Motty Berkowitz puts an average music video at between four and eight hours of filming. With commercial videos, clients are often taken aback by the price because they don’t realize the time and work involved.

Less crew means more physical effort from the producer/director himself. There is usually a gaffer, who takes responsibility for all the lighting, although Motty says he sometimes does both lighting and filming, while his friend and co-producer Rafi Barides co-directs and takes care of the props and all the nitty-gritty details.

With an outdoor shoot, a lot depends on the weather. Sunshine is not always best when it comes to filming.

“When we shot ‘Charosho,’ I really would have needed to order a lot of equipment to diffuse the sunlight over such a big set,” says Shlomo Rivkin. “I didn’t order it, but we davened and davened, and in the end, we had ten hours straight of cloud that day. All I needed was a little bit of light in the ‘kretshme’ scene, and at the time, I had no Plan B — and Hashem helped.”

During the entire shoot, the track plays loud, on speaker, so that the singer can sing along, essential for the all-important lip sync. If it’s not his own song, but, for example, original lyrics promoting an organization, the singer might not be fully fluent and comfortable with all the words. Moshe Finkelstein recalls that he was once hired by another director to film a shoot in a hotel some distance away, but the singers just didn’t know the words.

“We showed up at the venue, with crew and several musicians, and the singers just kept faltering. It was a complete disaster — no matter how many times we tried, they just could not sing the new words to this new tune. Meanwhile, we were racing against the clock as the light streaming through the windows began to fade. We had to scramble to get a professional teleprompter — you know what that is, think of POTUS giving a speech and the camera controlling it and stopping if he veers off the script. Once the teleprompter arrived, we put up a very large screen with the lyrics scrolling on it, and they could read the words while singing. We got a few takes, and that saved the day.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, issue 907)