The Bar Mitzvah Montage: A DIY Option

Montage is a French word meaning “the technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of photographs, text, or music.” However, if you ask anyone who has been to a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah in the past two decades, they will immediately describe it as the approximately ten-minute video of family photos highlighting the development of the bar mitzvah boy or bat mitzvah girl.

It’s possible that my bar mitzvah party back in October 1989 had the first do-it-yourself (DIY) video montage. My father created a montage using printed photographs he digitized with a camcorder and then assembled using the family’s Commodore Amiga computer. He recorded the montage (we called it a “slideshow”) onto a VHS tape and had it displayed on a large movie screen following the candle lighting ceremony. My father controlled the production with the large VCR remote control from his seat in the hotel ballroom. No one had ever seen such a production before, but it certainly caught on.
Today, no mitzvah celebration is complete without the montage. Knowing a few tricks will help you assemble your own montage without much hassle. With the right software, there’s really no reason to hire a company to produce the montage (although my tech company does this service if you don’t want to bother with it).

The most important thing to remember when creating the montage is that you don’t want to bore your guests. After all, they came to celebrate; they don’t want to sit and watch hundreds of photos of your family’s cruise to Alaska. Keeping the entire montage to approximately 100-150 photos (about 4-5 songs) is an ideal goal to set. You want to feature the bar mitzvah boy or bat mitzvah girl, but there shouldn’t be too many photos of them alone.

Teens and adults watching a Mitzvah Montage at a bat mitzvah party

GoPro, Wedit & DIY Wedding Videos

There was a time when having videographers at your wedding was a really expensive endeavor. The professional video guys would haul in the big rig cameras with special lighting and boom microphones. They would record hours of raw footage and then you'd wait more than six months for the edited VHS tape to arrive. After paying thousands of dollars you had a video with cheesy titles overlaid on poor quality footage that you'd never watch more than once (especially if you never converted it to DVD or a digital file).

Today, couples have many more options to preserve their big day. With the growing popularity of GoPro cameras, many couples begin their wedding experience by recording their engagement using a GoPro. These small cameras can easily be attached to the forehead or chest, or held on a long selfie stick to capture the intimate moment of a marriage proposal. Rather than having a friend come along to video the proposal or hiring a professional, the GoPro maintains the intimacy of the moment while still allowing it to be captured for posterity.

Brides and grooms have also recognized that a videographer only captures so many hours of the wedding weekend. If a video crew is hired for the ceremony and reception, they won't have any footage from the rehearsal dinner or those special moments at the after-party. There are also many wonderful moments that will be missed with only one or two camera operators at the wedding. When GoPro cameras are distributed to random guests and they're asked to capture as much footage as they can throughout the weekend, you're sure to get some quality moments that otherwise would have been missed.

A GoPro is a POV (point of view) camera meaning that it shows exactly what the person wearing it sees. That gives a different perspective than traditional wedding videos which are taken from static tripods or on the shoulder of a videographer. The aerial advantage points and wide-angle shots will lead to a unique finished product. There are also features on the GoPro like time-lapse video that will let the guests have fun while recording. Some find the footage from a GoPro to be nauseating due to the bounciness, but GoPro's Karma Grip fixes that with its stabilization ability. Encouraging guests to pass the GoPro cameras to each other will guarantee many different points of view throughout the weekend and allow the wedding couple to see their event through their guests' eyes. It is also fun to plant GoPros around the wedding ceremony and reception (they can be hidden in the flowers of a wedding bouquet or at the bar) to give a fun perspective on the event.

As a rabbi who officiates a lot of weddings I have seen a trend toward DIY videography. In some cases, it's a coordinated activity like giving out several GoPro cameras, but in other cases, it's the guests doing what they do naturally -- using their mobile phones to record video and take photos of the wedding. Many brides and grooms have told me that it's not a matter of cost, but they realize there will be so many wannabe Steven Spielbergs in the crowd that they are confident they'll get enough cellphone footage that they don't need to spend any extra funds on professional videographers.

The Maccabeats Channel Les Mis for Passover

I don't usually include Passover videos on this blog because, well, there usually aren't any worthy of watching. Until this Pesach that is!

The Maccabeats, Yeshiva University's acclaimed a capella group, do a wonderful job using the songs of Les Miserables to tell the Passover story. This video has much more acting than their previous Jewish holiday fare and the college boys do a nice job with it. No doubt this Pesach parody video will hit the million view mark on YouTube just as the Maccabeats' previous creations did.

Enjoy and Chag Sameach!