Google Doodle Partners With Israeli Video Startup To Remember 25 Years Since Fall Of Berlin Wall

By NoCamels Team November 09, 2014 3 minutes

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Google today decided to make a very special Google Doodle (the Google logo that changes daily). With only a short time to put the Doodle together, and a desire to make it as meaningful as possible, the Google team wanted to make a video compilation showing parts of the Berlin Wall that are currently on display in 17 countries across the world. With little time on their hands, the Google team in Mountain View, California turned to Israeli video production startup VEED.me to get crews filming in all locations.

The Berlin Wall: from divider to a unifier

Only weeks ago, the Google Doodle team set out for a short bike ride from the company’s headquarters to observe a piece of the Berlin Wall outside a local public library. This got the team excited about documenting all of the remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall, which was once the ultimate symbol of segregation, in an attempt to shed light on the beautiful irony of its division 25 years later. According to the company, “The gratified chunk of concrete, once a literal division, has been transformed into a symbol of unity, a reminder to passersby of the triumph of the collective human spirit.”

Fall of the Berlin Wall- November 9, 1989.

Yet in order to complete the task at hand, the Google Doodle team began thinking of ways to achieve unique footage of each of the Berlin Wall pieces scattered throughout the world. That’s when the Google Doodle team remembered that the Israeli video production platform VEED.me quickly outsources video production according to clients’ needs. “We [the Google team] asked them [VEED.me] to arrange 17 international film crews to document wall segments in 3 continents and within a week (!) we had it all ready.”

Any project is possible with ‘crowdsourced’ footage

VEED.me, a two-year-old Israeli startup, immediately got to work fulfilling Google’s Doodle vision, hiring videographers in Moscow, Hungary and Belgium to document the wall pieces and their unique graffiti. Google then went in and added a few shots of raw footage from that earth-shattering night in November 1989 when the wall of Communism came tumbling down. However, if it weren’t for VEED.me’s unique video production services, what co-founder and CEO Yoav Hornung says specializes in, “crowdsourcing for footage,” Google wouldn’t have been able to present one of its most stunning and moving Doodles yet.

Piece of Berlin Wall in Madrid, Spain.

Founded in 2012 by four fresh film school graduates, VEED.me’s platform hopes to make it easier for worthy clients to get the video footage they need by outsourcing projects to a community of over 2,000 videographers throughout the world. Hornung says the startup was founded because “instead of doing what we loved, we were forced to work as waiters and bartenders. We wanted to create a place that would make it easier not only for film makers and videographers like us to find work, but also for businesses to gain access to video production services at affordable prices.”

Creating any kind of video, from commercials to short films, VEED.me gained the attention of AOL’s Nautilus Israel incubator program, as well as UpWest Labs, which invested $20,000 in seed funding in the company nearly a year ago. Maybe with their big break as the Google Doodle video producer, VEED.me will be able to better market their unique video production technology as answering the video needs of none other than the giants of the Internet.

Photos: Screenshot