A HANUKKAH MIRACLE
You Know What I Want, Ah.
While this newsletter typically deals with my observations, suppositions and inferences (which, no matter how plausible they may seem, are only observations, suppositions and inferences) from other peoples’ work, today I’m going to switch it up with a deep dive on the history, concepting and execution of arguably the most successful project of my career, directing the music video for Daveed Diggs’s 2020 holiday jam, “Puppy for Hanukkah.”
As tends to be the case, I’ll start with personal reflections, observations and reminiscences, so if you’d like to go directly to the meat of the subject, do feel free to jump to IV. Everything I Ever Wanted For. But fair warning: by virtue of the subject matter, the personal reflections, observations and reminiscences won’t stop there.
When I’m not 1 I’m a creative marketing writer/producer for Disney Branded Television. Typically, my output is limited to promo and branding content, but every so often, my team gets the opportunity to make a standalone piece of creative, something that, if the fates allow, crosses over into the public view.
Tonight being the first night of Hanukkah, I thought I’d break a little from my typical format, and discuss just such an opportunity I had a few years ago, in what I consider to be not just probably my only contribution of any substance to Jewish pop culture, but a creative high-point in my career.
I love making things. Just love it. And when I get the opportunity to really put my shoulder into something, I get energized, and become fascinated by everything I find along the way in the experience.
I also love talking about making things, but I have a hard time striking the right tone in discussing my work. I’m not curing pancreatic cancer over here, I know that. So if this essay tips over into self-aggrandizing, I apologize in advance; know that it comes from a place of enthusiasm, and I hope not a failure of humility.
I. Let’s Get the Flame Started.
September, 2020.
My wife and I are driving to the Mission Tiki Drive-In in Montclair (RIP) to see Tenet, our first new big-screen movie since February, when I played for her Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 1963 recording of “The Lady is a Tramp” from the Live at the Sands album.
It’s one of my favorite recordings, full-stop, and I told her I loved it so much because Sammy clearly recognizes how un-fuck-with-able the song is; rather than showing off a bunch of pyrotechnic melisma, he rides the song’s jet-stream with verve and momentum. He trusts the material, and the results are unimpeachable.
A week later, I’m in my end-of-year review when Ash Randall, my creative director, flags me to produce a project that our VP, Jill Hotchkiss, was cooking up for the holidays.
For years, we had quietly bemoaned our air’s focus on Christmas - nothing the matter with Christmas programming, unless it comes at the expense of the other 13 religious holidays that fall in December - and Jill was resolved to do something about it. So she spent months working back-channel contacts to commission an original Hanukkah anthem for our air from Daveed Diggs, and she had just managed to lock him in.
And so Ash, knowing how I lived at the intersection of hip-hop and, y’know, being Jewish, tapped me to produce the project, and friends, I dove the fuck in.
October, 2020.
It’s just before office hours when Jill emails me Diggs’s demo, composed and recorded with William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes, his partners in the experimental hip-hop trio clipping.
Till now, I’d had no idea what to expect. I loved clipping., but couldn’t see how
Ski mask on with a burner cell phone
Desert Eagle 50 cal. imprint on the backbone
This one is not to be tested,
Unless you got Smith & Wesson quick at your disposal,
If not, better to head back home
would translate to an audience of kids. Still, I had faith in clipping.’s ability to deliver.2
In hindsight, knowing how everything shook out, it’s easy to admit to a certain hesitancy just before I hit play. I was about to find out if the next few months of my life were gonna be dedicated to something exciting, or making the best of a hard situation, and whichever it was gonna be, the second before I hit play was the last second I had to brace for it.
So I hit play. And friends, I need not have worried.
My job was clear: ride the song’s jet-stream, stay out of its way.
II. The Vomit Comet
As my pitch for the music video came together, it was Ash who suggested that, since I could already clearly see my way to what we wanted, I direct the video (paired with an ace First AD, which I got in the form of Hercules Goes, a man who lives the hell up to his name).
This, of course, changed the amount of skin I had in the game, and made me kick my planning phase into high gear; a minute ago, I was only a creative producer on it, which meant if there was something I couldn’t figure out, someone else would solve it. Now, someone else was me.
When a call was scheduled for us to present our pitch to clipping.’s reps, I went into ADHD overdrive3, and stayed up the night before the call storyboarding every single shot for the video.
As mentioned before, I can’t draw for shit, so I fired up Photoshop and off I went.
By the time I was done, 70-odd boards later, it was the wee hours, and I forced myself into bed.
Astronaut trainees prepare for zero-G conditions aboard the aircraft lovingly nicknamed the “vomit comet” which flies a deeply parabolic course at incredible speed; at the zenith of the arc, in the moment when the plane turns its steep climb into a steep dive, the passengers experience weightlessness.
When I haven’t had enough sleep, and am hyperfocused on a project, I achieve a state that, to my mind, is probably fairly similar to the apogee of the vomit comet’s arc. The rest of the world falls away, and I’m blessed/cursed with a kind of blunt, giddy clarity.
When I woke the next day, in time for the call, I discovered I was in this exact vomit comet condition.
That’s good news, really, because somewhere between the self-confidence that comes with having your shit together on a project and not having slept enough to be cautious, any of my usual timidity or self-reproach falls away.
We got on the call with clipping.’s management team … only to be joined by Diggs, Hutson and Snipes. I had completely misunderstood to whom I was pitching. But you know what? VOMIT COMET, folks. Let’s go.
I really only remember a few particulars about the call:
I was in the middle of making an exceptional, eloquent point when my airpods died, and nobody could hear me for like thirty seconds. So whatever I said I guess dies with me.
Diggs and co. were a little apprehensive at making a novelty song, but I reminded them that “Fight for Your Right to Party” is a novelty song, and the Beastie Boys seemed to land on their feet all right.
When they expressed hesitation over the line about learning the brachot phonetically, I told them if they changed it, I would walk off the project. Yes, that’s hyperbole, but quite literally the “phonetic” line was just the cheeky sort of very real Jewish experience4 captured in the song that made me fall in love with it.
The artists’ blessing secured, we moved into production.
III. Lights Keep Burning
November 7, 2020.
Backed into an early-December airdate, we set a shoot date the first weekend in November, on a soundstage in Hollywood.
Anybody who’s spent time on a set, back me up: time works funny on a soundstage. We spent the morning chewing through set-up after set-up, the whole thing gliding on greased rails, then next thing you know, you’re several hours behind.
Nothing’s gone wrong, just … time changed its mind about you.
That’s where we found ourselves two hours into the day, and that’s before we almost lost one of our kids to an allergic reaction.
Falling behind definitely displeased the ADHD that had carried me through that marathon plan-everything-out storyboard session a few weeks back, but working with Jill and Ash (and art director Neal Weisenberg), we came up with Plans B, C and D on the fly.
SPOILER: we didn’t get the whole shot list, but we had enough.
I reached out to my editor, Keegan Martin, and let him know that that storyboard roadmap I’d sent him to be his first cut was now sort of more of a guideline, and now we were really off to the races.
Quick sidebar, anybody else remember what went down on November 7, 2020?
We’re an hour into our shoot day when my phone starts blowing up.
First, my friend & fellow producer Carlo Olivares-Paganoni hits the group chat with the news.
Not ten minutes later, my wife comes through with this direct quote / diss track from our kid:
Not ten minutes after that, my production coordinator Kelli Rosenberg comes over to tell me we’re slipping a little behind schedule, but we can make up some time by folding a couple of set-ups down the shot list together, also Joe Biden is president.
Later that same day, the all-time gold medal GOAT of unforced errors happened.
We kept the politics to a minimum on set, staying focused on the work, so it wasn’t till I was back in my car after we wrapped that I let out a roar, rolled the windows down and bumped Run the Jewels all the way home.
IV. Everything I Ever Wanted For.
The hard drive with a lot of my PFH documents and data went down hard a few months ago5, so I can’t say for certain how many rounds of cuts we went through, but for some reason, “V6” sticks in my mind as the winner.
We open tracking along a floor, tilting up to find HERO KID A6 at a dining table.
I’m not trying to start here on a sour note, but I’m not actually that happy with this opening shot.
'It’s nobody’s fault but mine, and the Motion Design team did an amazing job tracking these credits into the shot, but the shot moves too fast for a clean read of the titles.
“But Alex,” you ask, “if you’re not happy with the shot, why did you keep it in the cut?”
Because I’d originally boarded it to be a more gradual introductory shot, intercut with inserts of Hero Kid A scrolling pics of puppies on his phone.
But we ran out of time to get the over-the-shoulder shot of the phone (in case you’re wondering why, when we tilt up to Kid A he’s got a phone in his hand that serves no purpose), and time was tight to get even this shot, which is why it feels rushed.
“But Alex,” you ask, “if you’re not happy with the shot, why did you keep it in the cut?”
Because I love an overture. A prologue. I love a pregnant pause before we get into things. I wanted the silent beat to cut through the noise of linear TV air, before dropping you into that hot clarinet intro.
And because I didn’t concept a backup plan for how to get into this thing, so if I’d started pulling at threads from the jump, I’d never get anywhere, and creation is an equation and sometimes the remainder of that equation is imperfection.
“But Alex,” you ask, “if you’re not happy with the shot, why did you keep it in the cut?”
Because it still works, and three years later, I sleep fine.
We tilt up to find our Kid A at the table, phone in hand.
Although … now that I’ve called out how pointless the phone is without the OTS intercuts, lemme walk that back. Remember how I said I like a prologue that lets you breathe before the action starts? In hindsight, I’m happy he’s got the phone to have a bit of business - a dash of regular life left behind when he spikes the camera and starts the show.
(Not to think too highly of myself, but it’s a bit like Jack taking a moment to wipe his mouth before breaking the fourth wall in Fight Club. I’m not saying I did Fincher-level work here, but if you haven’t figured out by now that details tend to stick in my mind, and it follows they’d pour out into my own work, can I recommend a few essays you might enjoy?)
Speaking of high-minded references to other works, I love a big title drop …
… and the way that that fat-ass clarinet hook kicks down the door BEGGED for just such a thing.
We punch into close-up as the kid starts lip-syncing the track. While a lot of after-the-fact ink about the video cited how much Kid A resembled Daveed Diggs, that was sort of incidental. Our brief was really just to cast faces that don’t look like the faces you’d expect to celebrate Hanukkah, in celebration of Jews of color who aren’t often represented in media. True, an early pitch of mine had had the three hero kids done up as miniature versions of the clipping. guys, but we abandoned it as an unneeded curlicue; that we wound up casting a kid with Daveed’s vibe was ultimately incidental.
From here, we match-cut to KID B in one of our neutral environments:
I’m like 90% certain that Keegan added the soft-focus tilt-shift around her edges; the snap-zooms are definitely his contribution, and I love the little pops of dynamism they bring.
I think this was our first set-up of the day, getting the kids dancing together, and though the camera flattens it, they were six feet apart7, being the only unmasked people on set. We got a ton of coverage out of this one set up, rotating the kids through each point on the triangle, with Jordan dollying in and out.
I’m not sure how well it comes across in the finished product, but the original idea was that the white cyc space was imaginary, while the household set was reality. In the original storyboarded version, the rap would start in this liminal space, and gradually be imported back into reality, but that conceptual thread became collateral damage when not making our whole day put us in a scramble.
Anyway, that’s why the chair from the dining table is in the fantasy space, to bridge the gap between the two.
We introduce KID C in a new framing, which we’ll return to for a few different of his actions.
We introduce the parents, framed like this for a fistful of reasons:
To keep the video rooted at kid’s-eye-level, it made sense to frame the parents like Peanuts8 adults; the action here reinforces a kid’s perspective of pre-holiday hustle, with the parents too busy to pay attention to what Kid A is asking for.
By framing out the parents’ faces, we could keep them masked on set, which gave us the latitude to stage them close to the kids / each other.
Also by framing out their faces, we could cast the same parents for all three kids.
Back to our triangle shot, splitting the difference between our kid’s-eye mandate and a Hype Williams low-angle.
One of the things I love about working with kids is, simply, they’re kids. You can see Kid C break his eyeline to camera to look at … probably me, to take his direction. Given more time to deliver, I might have frame-by-framed the cut9 and asked to cut around it, but I’ve spoken before about how the seams make the garment, and my own work shouldn’t be exempt from that.
If this eyeline-break ruins the video for you, I will send you a gift certificate good for one (1) hug.
We had it on the schedule to shoot inserts of a hanukkiah (camera-left in the Kid A dining table shot), but they got chucked overboard as soon as we began falling behind schedule. I hated to lose any of the planned shots, but then I remembered a shoot we’d done a year earlier, where we’d shot a hanukkiah in time-lapse, and if we could unearth that footage, we could stay on track for our day.
So yeah, this was shot about 13 months earlier, on a different soundstage.
HOLLYWOOD, BAYBEHHHHH.
In my initial pitch/lookbook, I’d wanted a kid to have a flame manicure on eight fingers; I think it was my sister who suggested stickers might get the job done more cost-effectively. They certainly read better from a greater distance which, considering how it saved a set-up and custom manicure on an already-tight day, meant the stickers pay for themselves.
More big fat type, this time to help get a little education into the proceedings, underscoring what Hanukkah is all about.
This dreidel shot is also from that 2019 Hanukkiah shoot. Waste not, want not.
When I settled into the “kids snooping for presents” thread (codenamed “Mitzvah: Impossible” in my notes), the first shot that came to me was the Kilroy shot.
More Hollywood Magic™: this isn’t a real closet. It’s a pop-up door-frame10, and a shelf with presents for the reverse. I love playing with practical lighting, so we were very specific in directing Kid B to point the flashlight right down the barrel of the lens; my hat’s off to Keegan for bookending these insert shots with flashlights blow-outs.
And look, is this an innovation on par with, say, the T-1000? You be the judge. But for me, as an audience member, touches like this are playful; as a director, they’re just fun.
Ok, so, look. The number of candles in the hanukkiah were originally going to track chronologically. Then … that did not happen. Again, if this ruins it for you, my one (1) hug offer stands.
A word about textural references to other works: I came of age in the 90s, at a time when “homages” to existing movies and TV were de rigueur, an almost-valorized practice which I mistook for the ability to flex the depth and breadth of my (appallingly narrow in hindsight) pop culture acumen by whole-cloth stealing other people’s work.
Why mention this now? Because we’re about to get to the clarinet cutaway:
I like to think I don’t approach references that way anymore - I’m neither expecting someone to say “Hey, that’s just like this one ‘Mo Better Blues production still!” and think I’m a real cool guy for including it; nor am I trying to get away with copying someone else’s work. We’re inspired by - and aspire to - the works that have made an impression on us, and I think it’s our responsibility to then raise our ideas to the level of that inspiration as best we can. I’ll leave it to you to determine how I did.
Now, speaking of homage, this is a coincidental, almost-homage, found when Keegan layered elements in post, overlaying Kid A with the 2019 hannukiah shot:
“But Alex,” you ask, “what is this an almost-homage to?” Why, only my favorite Hanukkah11 movie of all time:
It was only once I saw Keegan’s built-in-post overlay that I immediately became furious with myself for not intentionally building an homage to this shot into the video.
Alex Likes Great Big Type, Part III:
Once more, we’re match-cutting from limbo to reality, finding the kids in the same position in both.
Kid B, by the way, was a natural deadpan, a perfect contrast to the wide-open faces of the other two Kids, and a surefire cut-to. Thanks, Kid B.
If my observations seem to come a bit loosey-goosey at this point, I realize that’s to do with having originally planned the video to loosely follow a narrative, which was necessarily scrapped when we didn’t make our day; unconstrained by narrative, Keegan was able to put our imagery into a kind of sensible shuffle, one that supports the song’s steady thrust, but keeps things on a zig-zag.
Another element in the demo that charmed me right off the bat was Diggs’s self-made SFX for presents furiously being opened, interrupting the orderly rhythm and rhyme of the verse.
I wanted to represent that hyperkinetic interruption visually, so my mind automatically went to Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz commentary, where he discusses mimicking Tony Scott’s double-and-triple-exposures —
— so I wanted to recreate the recreation, adjusted for kids’ TV:
That’s right, folks, you heard it here first: there’s Tony Scott (RIP), there’s Edgar Wright, and there’s me.
Now, remember, I’m counting on you to warn me if I tip over into grandiosity.
Note the hard landing, post-montage, on Kid B’s underwhelmed present-face. Like I said, surefire.
If you haven’t figured out by now that my thesis is “man plans, god laughs,” I present to you the most ambitious series of shots of the day - our one concrete narrative sequence - in storyboard form:
As boarded (pardon my digital chicken-scratch), the shot would have started tight on the Kid (A1,), pulled back down the length of the table (A2), arriving at the far end of the table in time for Dad to sit into his chair (A3), cut to a reverse angle (B), then back to a medium of the Kid (C).
The idea was to break up such a long stretch of cut-cut-cut with a comparatively long shot to let the storytelling breathe a little bit.
And then, in the edit bay, it didn’t work.
So rather than stick to a principle that wasn’t working in practice, we chopped the shot up to keep the momentum rising12:
Last week, I mentioned having been choir president in high school, and I’d loved how the demo had threaded together chord progressions and melodies from traditional Jewish songs I knew from those years, like Shalom Aleichem and S’vivon Sov Sov Sov (more on that below), but I was ill-prepared for how seamlessly the brachot over the candles was integrated into the bridge (with airhorn pew-pew-pews, no less). How prepared? Ill.
It was in the spirit of inclusion (and explication) that we decided to add the singalong keyables (MORE BIG TYPE!)
BTW, if you’re wondering what the balloons and confetti have to do with Hanukkah - not really anything.
But they were on the same drive from the same shoot as the Hanukiah footage, and they don’t go against Hanukkah, so again, waste not, want not.
So, how much do I love that “phonetic” line I mentioned before?
Enough to make a phonetic joke about the word “phonetic.”
More Tony Scott / Edgar Wright madness:
I did get a note along the way asking why we see the flash-cut of a puppy in there if the present being opened doesn’t contain a puppy, and my answer was three-fold:
Creatively, we’re seeing what’s in the kids’ minds as they’re in the pink mist of gift-unwrapping frenzy
Presentationally, we’re two and a half minutes into a music video called Puppy for Hanukkah, and haven’t seen a puppy yet
Logistically, we paid for a whole shoot day with a puppy13, we were gonna get as close to our money’s worth as possible
In hindsight, this might have been a needlessly long clapback to a brief note about two frames of video, but it made the cut, so.
Kid B’s finest deadpan moment:
I can’t recall if I directed her to spike the camera at the end, but she did and I love it.
Back with Kid C into our most intensive visual FX shot, eat your heart out, Avatar:
The inspo for this shot is two-fold, first for attitude:
… because I couldn’t go down the hip-hop x Judaism path without invoking my beloved Beastie Boys.
Second, for staging/framing, inspo came straight out of real life, the prior Hanukkah, rolling Hanukkah bones with my kid on my dad’s living room floor:
(The kid absolutely took me to the cleaners, btw.)
One of the only ideas that made it from the earliest brainstorm to the finished product unchanged was using the interior of a spinning dreidel as a zoetrope:
The story goes that, when they were shooting Fantastic Voyage (1966), a scene called for the cast to remove attacking antibodies from Raquel Welch; not wanting to be creeps, they reached everywhere but her breasts. This created a “Vegas Showgirl” effect of only having antibodies left on her boobs. Seeking to remedy this, on the next take, they only reached for the antibodies on her boobs. Finally, the director had to choreograph who would remove what from where.
I mention it because part of the reason we wound up burning up our morning was me being particular about the timing of how/when/where to throw the props in this shot:
It bears mentioning that Kid A was a rock for take after take, no matter what we (literally) threw at him.
And finally, we come to the titular puppy (well, puppies):
Friends, in addition to being a Jewish hip-hop stan, the third axis that I like to think made me the man for the job is I am 100% a dog-person, through and through.
My storyboards were littered with reference pics of my own dog, Mabel —
— who unfortunately lacks the discipline to do a day’s work on a set.
But friends, now for the day’s greatest tragedy - not the incomplete shoot schedule - but COVID protocols prohibited anybody but the animal wrangler and the kid talent from directly interacting with the set dogs. I COULD GET NO CLOSER TO THE PUPS THAN SIX FEET, MY DAY WAS NEARLY RUINED, but ultimately, these concerns are secondary, swallow my pride, stiff upper lip, i’m a professional, all that.
So, funny story about Kid A14; when the video dropped, and my kid was telling his zoom class how I’d directed it, his teacher pointed out that Kid A was a fellow student at the school.
Some months later, I got tapped by the PTA to produce a welcome video for the school, with students and teachers, and my first step was to make sure I could re-team with Kid A.
Great kid.
Anyway, the kids got to hang out with the dogs. I got to watch. It’s fine, I’m fine.
A bit of post-production glint from my intrepid motion design team:
And now, our festivities drawing to a close, why not take it home showing WC Fields how wrong he was about working with kids and animals, with a montage of that very thing:
Late in the day, the dogs lost a bit of focus15, so these solo pickups of Jack and/or Jill the dog were caught basically by a gang of us creating a loose perimeter to hem the dogs in and just shooting what we could get, so maybe WC Fields wasn’t entirely wrong.
V. Great, Love It All
June, 1994.
I’m a scruffy teen a few months away from film school, dropping by the house of a girl I’ve been chatting up the past couple weeks. I’ve kicked off my Birks on the ride over, and haven’t bothered putting them back on once I’m out of the car. I ring the doorbell, ask the woman who answers if her daughter is home. She notes - and permanently cements in her mind - that I’ve shown up barefoot.
I don’t know what I was thinking, and I don’t think she was wrong for judging me. I’m still friends with the girl, and to this day, this data point is how her mother thinks of me.
December, 2020.
The video drops, and the response is overwhelming. There followed merch, a Little Golden Book, and an undying hope in me that we’ll get another bite at the apple, to stage a new creative approach to Puppy in our “post” pandemic world.
I’d be lying if I said the song’s accolades didn’t mean much to me - 25 years into my career, it still kind of blows my mind that I get to work on things like this at all, or that I got to work on this one, and that it landed with people exactly as we wanted.
For me, the juice was in those four weeks of vomit comet ideation, in the quick, decisive post-production, and not least of all, in that one incredible shoot day.
There’s one personal accolade the video brought me, though, that meant the world to me:
My friend’s mother, the one who never got over me showing up on her doorstep barefoot, added me on Facebook.
Happy Hanukkah,
AG.
NOTE: All images are the property of their copyright-holders. No ownership implied.
Where, among other things, I obsess over the textural minutia of movies, tv and music.
And if that faith had failed, I could always fall back on, let’s be honest, my intense inclination toward being a starfucker.
I don’t know about you, but I manage my ADHD with intense, detailed organization; yes, it’s an upstream swim, but the alternative is chaos.
I mean, how do you think I learned my haftorah?
Back your files up! Always! Everywhere!
While storyboarding, I had to call the kids something to differentiate them; when in doubt, cite Radiohead.
Remember those days?
Which itself becomes a nice bit of texture ctrl+v’d from another holiday perennial
A thing I haven’t actually done until this writing.
Quite literally popped up near the end of the day, in the middle of the set
A cadre of Jewish soldiers must reclaim a place of worship from an invading force, cumulating in a miraculous combustion, thanks for coming to my TED Talk
At my last bar mitzvah lesson, my instructor told me something important about all the Hebrew I’d spent the prior months committing to memory: “On the day, if you make a mistake, only two people will know - you and me. And I’m not gonna be there.” Really, if I hadn’t written this essay, I could’ve taken this to the grave, but then what good is my writing this essay if I don’t pull back the curtain a little?
Two puppies, actually - their names were Jack and Jill
I’ve omitted their names, btw, not to deprive them of credit, but because they’re kids
Who among us is perfect?