Running Drill

A few days before Succos, Yossie called with an update.

“Lipa’s available to come down to yeshivah right after Yom Tov. Can you get a crew to yeshivah to film the music video?”

“Sure — but what’s with the lyrics? Are they finalized?”

“Not exactly, Lipa’s been pretty busy,” he told me.

Yossie suggested focusing on the choruses for this shoot, because even though the low parts of the song needed to be rewritten (the original song focuses on kiruv), the chorus about staying put in the beis medrash would remain the same. I cautioned him that this would mean we’d need to do a whole second shoot with Lipa once we had the low part so we could film him singing it once we got it, but since this was the one opportunity to get Lipa with the bochurim, we agreed to go ahead.

To accommodate Lipa’s hectic schedule, we sent down a crew at 1 a.m. to spend a few hours at Aderes Hatorah and capture the boys learning, dancing, and interacting with Lipa while he sang, which would bring a lot of energy to the video.

Broadcast Blitz

A month or so later we received the new lyrics, and we sat down to strategize the plan for the second shoot in the US. We knew that without the energy of the bochurim behind Lipa, we needed some fresh ideas. Senior production manager Moshe Niehaus had the inspiration.

“You see here where the lyrics talk about how we’re not looking for devarim beteilim?” he said, pointing at the words. “When I think of devarim beteilim in the context of sports, it’s not the game itself that stands out, it’s the weeks of broadcast analysis leading up to it. The game only lasts so long, but you can literally spend hours every day listening to sports talk show hosts pontificate about what could, should, and likely will happen.”

I nodded — I knew exactly what he was talking about — and asked, “So how do we show that visually?”

Moshe’s vision was that we set up our own sports broadcast, complete with actors in a professional studio, and have Lipa sneak into the “secure” facility and take it over. Instead of the screen behind the announcers showing sports highlights, he would switch it to footage of Super Seders from previous years, with the bochurim learning and dancing up a storm.

It was an ambitious plan, but the yeshivah loved it, and we got to work writing up new shot lists and coordinating the details.

Calling an Audible

We always try to plan our shoots with the final video in mind, and the more thorough we are in pre-production, the easier editing will be. With a music video in particular, though, there is always a lot of room for creativity on the editing side as well. After all, there’s a full three minutes of song that needs visuals, with each shot averaging only three to five seconds; there are no interviewees to show; and the story can really be told in a tenth of that time.

VFX associate Jeremy Lewis took the lead on editing, with the goal of keeping the video engaging all the way through. One of the scenes we had scripted was to have a close-up shot of Lipa peering through a pair of binoculars, scoping out the studio before climbing the fence and breaking in. We could have left the shot as is, but Jeremy found the perfect scene to help frame it: a clip of the security guard raising his head. He put two circles around it, like you would see when looking through binoculars, and slowed down the footage to build the suspense. In the final video, Lipa peers through the binoculars, and all of a sudden, an angry-looking face appears on the other side of the lens. Scary? Yes — and definitely engaging.

Tactical Takeover

Many productions will have a “money shot,” that one crucial scene around which the rest of the video is built. Ours was clearly going to be when Lipa hits the switch to change the studio screens from Super Bowl to Super Seder, but when Jeremy showed me a rough version of the video, I was a little hesitant.

“I’m almost worried it will be anticlimactic to just have that one shot,” I said. “What if we follow that up later in the video with a wall of screens, like the floor samples in an electronics store, all switching to the learning footage as well?”

Jeremy said he’d work with VFX associate Mrs. Shayna Koppenheim to see what they could do, and a few hours later, he called me over with a mischievous grin on his face.

“You asked for that one shot of the screens changing, right? How do you feel about seven?”

Between the two of them, they had found a wide array of clips, ranging from a boy watching a game at home to doctors looking at a medical monitor to a newscaster in China, and switched the original images on the screen for the Super Seder shots. They even put one on the moon! It adds a lot of fun to the production, and it also helps tell the story — globally this time — of Lipa taking over the Super Bowl.

Defensive Line

One thing I’ve learned in my years in the production industry is that it’s all about the details. If you really want a viewer to be fully absorbed, every i has to be dotted. With that in mind, when we hired actors to play the broadcasters, we didn’t just search for people who looked the part, we wanted people with real broadcasting experience, and when we needed a football stadium as a backdrop behind Lipa for the opening sequence, we found a parking garage with the perfect view of MetLife stadium behind it rather than opting for the more limiting green screen.
But sometimes, more important considerations outweigh our quest for perfection. Jeremy was looking through the studio footage when he called me over.
“Moshe, this is ostensibly a national broadcasting studio, right? So why is there a mezuzah on the doorpost?”
We had filmed in a state-of-the-art studio that happened to be Jewish-owned, and the doorpost was part of the recording.
“We worked so hard to keep everything authentic,” Jeremy continued. “Do you want me to blur out the mezuzah?”
I didn’t have to think twice before I told him to leave it as is. Somehow taking a mezuzah off a door — even virtually — felt wrong.

Postgame Breakdown

We polished up the video with a last round of effects and sent it to Yossie Friedman to review. He was in Eretz Yisrael at the time, and since we only hit render at about 5:30 p.m. here, we weren’t sure he would see it that night. But it took only three minutes — the length of the video — for his voice messages to start pouring in. He loved it! The excitement, the creativity, and mostly the messaging.

“This is exactly what Super Seder is about,” he exclaimed. “Hijacking the hype of the Super Bowl and channeling it into Torah instead.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1047)