Outtakes from a video production studio
When we created a music video for Nishmas Hatorah’s building campaign last year, we collaborated with comedic songwriter and performer Binyomin Miller to produce something the bochurim, who get involved in the annual fundraising campaign, would be excited to share. Binyomin wrote a song called “Incomplet” (yes, the missing “e” is intentional), with whimsical lyrics describing incomplete items — half a slice of pizza, gilah and rinah without any ditzah — as a metaphor for the half-finished building the yeshivah was trying to complete. The campaign was a tremendous success, and both the yeshivah and their marketing team, ConsultWrite, knew they wanted to bring Binyomin back this year. The challenge would be building on the success of “Incomplet” without falling prey to stale-sequel syndrome.
Binyomin’s brainstorm was to do a song called “Complete” — not in the glaringly obvious direction of lauding the completed building, rather a more figurative approach focusing on the complete experience the yeshivah gives their talmidim. We thought it had great potential, as did ConsultWrite and Rabbi Pinchus Weinberger, rosh yeshivah of Nishmas Hatorah. Aside from the fresh angle, it would also allow us to showcase how the yeshivah gives the talmidim tools for life.
Binyomin got to work writing the lyrics, and he came to us mid-February with a draft. In order to differentiate it completely from last year’s video, he started the song with a two-paragraph backstory about… a color specialist who devoted years of his life developing a specific shade of paint.
The color the specialist had finally created was, according to Binyomin’s story, the color used in Nishmas’s new building. Our challenge was to create 60 seconds of content that would keep a viewer engaged, all while discussing creating a color. We couldn’t expect people to watch paint dry, so we decided to go all out, hiring an actor to portray a mad-scientist character, playing with all sorts of beakers and tubes in his effort to create that elusive shade. Our Amazon cart was soon filled with an aspiring chemist’s supplies: litmus test strips, ingredients for elephant toothpaste (having blue foamy liquid spilling over the beaker sells the experimentation look), dry ice, and beakers and tubes of all shapes and sizes.
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