Incredibly, in just two hours of filming, we had what we needed for the video

“The song is ready to go out and they want a music video yesterday,” says Moshe Finkelstein, Owner Of Crunch Time Media, Describing The Pressure Faced by producers. Although music videos may have been in the works from the early stages of planning a song’s release, they are almost always left to the end to execute.

Sometimes, the video is a last-minute addition or afterthought. Joey Newcomb’s “Just Love Them” video, for example, a tribute to Rabbi Dovid Trenk a”h, was pulled off in just two hours. With the book of the same title all ready to hit the shelves, there wasn’t much time to create a clip echoing Rabbi Trenk’s message of unconditional love.

Moshe Finkelstein recalls the last-minute arrangements. “We knew we wanted to do a film in a yeshivah, and we found a school that let us shoot there, but we had no time to plan, and so Joey and I walked in there with no idea of what we were going to do. Incredibly, in just two hours of filming, we had what we needed for the video.”

One reason for the pressure is that by the time a song reaches a video producer, it is already essentially complete, from composition to lyrics to recording. The mix may still undergo some fine-tuning before it’s ready for release, but the producer needs to be presented with a finished product in terms of the song’s structure and timing.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, issue 907)