Solar Gangnam Style: Do the Solar Dance

 SolarEdge 2012 Happy Holidays Clip

One thing I can say about the music for this year’s video: the decision to go with Gangnam Style was easy and almost unanimous.  So we had a song and we had a concept – we wanted to do the solar dance, something fun and happy that everyone can relate to.  We also knew we want it to include SolarEdge employees only. No professional actors, singers, dancers. But then we thought – seriously? We don’t have employees that are actors, singers, dancers. Will our engineers, salesmen and operation staff be willing to participate? Will they manage to do it nicely? 

Practicing the Solar Dance outside our dining room

And performing the Solar Dance on Tel Aviv’s beach early in the morning

And also, Gangnam style is a rather sexy song. Can we do sexy? Should we do sexy? The director of the video wanted some bikinis in the clip, but we thought about it and told him our engineers would surely look better in suits… 

Eytan Heller, superstar and sales manager for Central America and the UK, Ofer Luke, Manager of SolarEdge Support and Yoni Ziv, Director of Technical Marketing doing the Solar Dance

We wanted to include in the video as many employees as possible, and surely anybody who wants to be in it, but what do we do with the >40 employees we have in offices around the world? Naturally, we wanted all our colleagues from the Munich, Fremont CA, Tokyo, Shanghai, London, Paris and Treviso to participate, but time and budget limitations did not allow filming them. Here is the solution we came up with…

From left to right: on the bodies of HQ employees, heads of Joachim Nell, General Manager for Central Europe, Nobu Fukatsu, Senior Director of Business Development, APAC, Laura Eifertinger, Marketing, Germany, (Eytan), Elisa Baccini, Regional Representative, Italy, Peter Mathews, VP North America Sales & Christian Huber, Sales Manager, Germany

To make things easier for everybody and to help our people loosen up and enjoy the dancing, we wanted to bring some beer for the shooting but our VP legal would not allow people to drink at work and then drive home, so we had to just enjoy it soberly, and I have to admit, she gave a very good example of how it’s done…

We had plenty of adventures. We had to keep in mind the safety rules while dancing on the roof, we managed to schedule shooting in the few sunny days between the winter storms, we somehow managed to keep the locations at least whole if not clean and tidy, and more…

 …But forget about logistics, above all, making this video was, as it was in previous years, fun, fun, fun. We hope you get the same feeling watching it!

Oh, and one more thing about this song, even after listening to it almost non-stop for the last couple of weeks during writing the lyrics, recording, shooting and editing, I can honestly say – you just can’t have too much of it. Even in the millionth time of hearing it, when I get to minute 1:07, hearing “now it’s solar time,” I start jumping. Play it again, see for yourselves…

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

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