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PRODUCTION NOTES
In 2006, Youssef was contracted by the Afghani-American purveyors of a new satellite channel to be launched in Afghanistan called Ariana Television Network. His job? To create two dozen music videos for the network’s nascent programming schedule.
Over the course of two days, Youssef set up his video camera, lights and large bluescreen sheet in an Afghani restaurant located in Teaneck, NJ and set out to record the talented singers and musicians who performed all of their songs in Afghan only!
Surmising that the best (and clearest) way to capture both video and music soundtrack as synced as possible was to have the talent lip-sync their songs as they played on the restaurant’s CD sound system. Youssef had to convince all present that this was the best method available so as to stay within budget and on time.
Using only one camera (Sony DCR-TRV950), Youssef recorded each song twice: once for the master shot and the second for close-ups. Interestingly—and initially, the Afghani producers were only looking to utilize the wide shot videos with the bluescreen backing (so as to later insert their own backgrounds once the video masters were in Kabul)—as this was the way their music videos were made back then. However, once they were given an alternate version of both masters and close-ups, with some nifty graphics keyed into the background, the producers became elated.
The 24-28 music videos created by Youssef were edited on an Apple Mac G4 using Final Cut Pro, Live Type and Compressor (for internet versions). The music CDs provided were introduced into Soundtrack Pro, clean & filtered and edited perfectly into FCP. The artistry involved is that Youssef (as editor) did not speak nor understand Afghan—so editing both video and audio in perfect sync took more effort than usual.
The winning results are laid out above (a few samples of many) for your enjoyment.
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