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The Making of the SolarEdge LipDub

With the holiday season upon us and SolarEdge celebrating its 4^th anniversary, we decided to send our partners, colleagues and friends a special greeting. Something that will represent the spirit and values of the company, and will bring big smiles to the faces of those who receive it.

Liron, our Hardware Team Manager and Program Manager, referred us to a LipDub video prepared by a bunch of his friends and we all agreed that this should be our greeting.

First step was finding a song. Early candidates were “Walking on Sunshine” and “Sunny”, and the leading nominee was ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky”, with the phenomenal chorus:

Mister blue sky please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long

Surveys, votes and polls were taken, loud and enthusiastic debates were raging down the hallways, but when our CEO’s wife, came up with the brilliant idea of R.I.O’s “Shine On” we all knew at once that this is our song. It’s happy, the words are sunny and bright, it’s got good rhythm, and it fits like a glove to our hand.

What next? Choose locations, create a storyboard, draw schemes of trails, people and roles. Here’s an example of one trail out of the six filmed: 

The genre rules dictate that a lipdub is filmed in one shot, but we really wanted to incorporate our production lines and production team in the video, so we had to cut it once.

Our dear old buddy Murphy (the one from Murphy’s Law) paid us a visit, and a few days before the filming, the weathermen forecast a terrible storm for the shooting day. Since we wanted to film the final scene on our solar testing balcony, we had to reschedule the shooting to the latest sunny day forecast. That left us exactly 24 hours to print out the signs that we would all be holding in the final scene, and we scheduled the shooting for the day after. No time for rehearsals!

Shooting day came and our main objective was to make sure that everybody was in a good mood, willing to spend the day dancing and singing rather than attending meetings and answering emails.

Props were one way to lift the spirits:

Alcohol was another…

 

Last minute preparations. Since we were using an HD camera, everybody had to wear some powder or make-up to avoid “glowing” and to hide those little skin secrets we want to keep to ourselves…

 

Just before starting the shooting, the director divided us into groups according to the trails and briefed each group separately. People volunteered (and from time to time were volunteered by others) to take positions along the trail, and received their lines. Every group received its part of the song in advance, so by then we all (theoretically) knew the words by heart.

And then it started. The cameraman was usually walking backwards, with the assistant-director pulling him to prevent him from tripping. We would usually walk forward, trying to remember our route, sing the lyrics, dance, and look casual – all at once!

It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. The fact of the matter is we had to hold several rehearsals for each group and then shoot (all in one shot, remember?), watch the shot, learn the mistakes and fix them in the next shot (just to find out that other people made other mistakes…):

The most difficult scene was the last one, in which everybody had to grab a sign and hold it in the right position so that it formed a complete picture:

Want to know what it forms?  Want to see the final result?

We proudly present the SolarEdge “Shine On” LipDub: