Pre-Production

The success of any project is in the details. For this video, we knew we’d need actors, the question was how many. There are two schools of thought when it comes to an emotional video like this: variety and consistency. Variety means getting as many actors as possible — older/younger, working/learning, black hat/knitted kippah —to ensure all viewers feel represented. The one drawback is that there’s no one protagonist in whom you really invest your emotion. Consistency, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach: follow one person throughout, and let viewers really experience his world. The goal in both options is that the viewer identifies with the protagonists on-screen, but their approaches — and how they play out in scripting and videoing — are very different.

In this case, we agreed using one central character made the most sense, but it was not without its challenges. For example, we wanted to highlight lifecycle milestones. If we used the same person throughout, how could we capture both the birth of his children and their weddings decades later?

Twenty Years in One Morning

Our plan was that our actor would be in several different scenes: in his mid-twenties as a new father, pushing 40 as he celebrated his son’s bar mitzvah, — with the final scene at his son’s wedding, a good 22 years from our first scene. We do film for long hours, but two decades is a bit much.

We researched various options for how to work this time span, and we narrowed it to two choices: hire a professional makeup artist to “transform” our actor between scenes, or use sophisticated photo-editing software to age our actor after the shoot. We ultimately went for option B, which would give us more flexibility in nuances. An artist can color an actor’s hair and add wrinkles, but on a computer, there are even more possibilities: trim the beard, narrow the face, and so on, allowing for several versions of the actor throughout his life in the video, and it would all be seamless. (In the end, we used a middle-aged actor, so we actually had to de-age him in editing.)

Simultaneous Action

The wow moment of our script called for our protagonist to stand in his home and study a wall of photos of milestones. They’d depict him with his family, and slowly, we’d have the actor disappear from the scene in the photos, a visual that drives home how someone struggling with addiction is not fully present. This could show the positive as well, because in our video, after GYE helps, he reappears in the same photos.

Our plan was pretty simple — but the execution was anything but. We needed to take the photos in our green screen studio, run the age regressions, and then edit them onto the proper backgrounds. Only then could we print the pictures, hang them in frames on the wall, and film our actor in the shot with them. The challenge was that we needed it to get done all in one day, because asking actors to return for a second shoot is more expensive for GYE.

You might think it would make more sense — and certainly be less stressful for our schedule — to video our actor staring at a blank (green screen) wall and then editing that wall to add our printed de-aged photos after. But we don’t generally use the green screen technique for video backgrounds, because the angles, perspectives, and lighting can be difficult to match up; a still background is simpler. For the shot of the father looking at the progression of his family and their milestones on the wall, a lot of the emotion comes from the camera motion as it pans down the wall, and a still image wouldn’t do it justice.

For this reason, we decided to go the photo-editing-on-the-spot route, and Moshe Niehaus reached out to several freelance editors around the world to share samples of age progression editing. He selected one from Eretz Yisrael who did the most convincing job and had the quickest turnaround.

Group Effort

The morning of the shoot we had all hands on deck. Two cinematographers in our studio were taking pictures and video of our actor, which we then WhatsApped to the editor in Eretz Yisrael to work his magic. Post Production Manager Mrs. Rivky Leibenstein and VFX Director Mordy Fisgus edited the pictures and placed them in backgrounds as they came back with the age regression. Everyone was working at top speed, but it did take several hours to have the pictures print-ready. Once we had them set, we printed them at a local store, and my wife, newborn baby in tow, fought traffic to pick them up so we could hang them.

The shoot time was drawing to a close by the time we got the printed photos. In my rush to hang them up, I was having a hard time getting most of the previously framed pictures (my own family’s memories and milestones, in fact) out of the glass. I quickly decided to just frame the new ones without the glass—which actually worked out better, because the one photo that had the glass over it had a bad glare when we filmed, and we actually had to spend time in post-production fixing that.

Screen Time

In addition to the happy moments, we also shot several scenes of our protagonist on his laptop computer, to have something to show as the interviewees discussed addiction issues. Most of the footage was taken from angles so you couldn’t see the actual screen: tight shots of fingers typing, views from the front or side that show the casing of the laptop rather than the front. There was one over-the-shoulder shot that did show the screen though, and as Post Production Coordinator Usher Weldler was editing, he asked me what to do with it.

“The shot is pretty stable, so we should be able to put whatever we want onto the screen, but what do we want to put on? We can’t exactly show problematic content….” His voice trailed off.

I suggested putting one of the interviewees on the screen and having him “speak” to the actor from his own laptop.

Usher called me over a little while later.

“I tried what you suggested, it’s definitely an interesting idea, but I think I have an even better one,” he said. “Why don’t I save that shot for the second half of the video, where the speakers discuss the services GYE offers, and then show the protagonist scrolling through the GYE website?”

It was the perfect solution, as it made full use of the cinematic shot while still staying on point and positive.

Callback

Feedback was great, and hearing that people of all ages appreciated the video drove home the idea that no matter the subject, there is always a positive approach. We knew it had hit its mark when our point-person at GYE said, “It was so different from what we’ve done in the past — this is the first time I would be maskim to share the video with my family.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1033)