Some of you might know Luke McKibben because you’ve been to our Beau and Abe Merfish No Place for Hate® Youth Summit and you’ve seen him skillfully facilitate a StepUp! assembly there.

But chances are, you don’t notice Luke much, even though he’s around, because he’s a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.  In addition to being a wonderful, much-utilized A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute facilitator for ADL, Luke is our videographer, and you have to go behind the scenes with Luke and Lukrative Video Productions to see how the Karen H. Susman Jurisprudence Award videos are made.

Most of our tribute videos for the Jurisprudence luncheon are under 10 minutes long, but so much time and effort go into the final product.

Luke says he probably averages 30 to 45 hours on each video.  Tribute videos typically involve about four interviews or taping sessions, with each of those sessions involving two cameras, two microphones, three lights, and four tripods or light stands. Luke also shoots extra video of the interview subjects that can be used to cover narration, and that can involve even more setups of lights and cameras.  He’ll also shoot or scan still photos of our honorees, requiring a couple more of hours of work.

Once the video is shot, he has to import it, synch the audio and the video from his two cameras, and process them with a time code in order to pinpoint the best quotes.   Then he uploads the videos and provides links to them so they can be viewed and the quotes can be pulled out and put into the script.

After the script is written, and audio is recorded at Luke’s studio, editing begins.  Luke likes to call editing a “creative decision-making process.”  That’s a great way to characterize it, because he has to match a myriad of still photos, video, and news reports and articles to the narration.  He generally calls all the shots here, deciding which visual goes best with each phrase and even covering parts of the interviews with video.

This year’s Jurisprudence video about Paul Yetter is even more involved.  Luke not only made a site visit to Mr. Yetter’s office, he attended a meeting to discuss the video with the honoree before any shooting began.   Luke also flew in and out of New York City on a whirlwind, one-day trip to videotape two interview subjects who had many fine things to say about Mr. Yetter.

All that effort yields about five-to-seven minutes of video—and all that hard work is worthwhile—for the honoree, ADL and Luke.

He says he enjoys the Jurisprudence video process for a lot of reasons, but especially because it widens his horizons:

“What goes through my mind each time is, ‘Who am I going to meet this time?’ I’m always inspired by them and the work they’re doing. That’s probably the most valuable thing: realizing that the legal profession does a lot of very impactful work that I probably wouldn’t have been aware of or have on my radar screen.”