A trib­ute to Nick and Alison, my old laid-back room­mate (who taught me how to make a mean grilled cheese, offered a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge in Counter Strike, and intro­duced me to Lamb) and his new bride.

[kml_flashembed movie=”/videos/events/nickandaliwedding/nickandaliwedding.swf” width=“480” height=“342” wmode=“transparent”/]

I would say some­thing about the wed­ding, but the video says it all.


Thumbnail: Brent
Thumbnail: Bronwen
Thumbnail: A Cupcake cake
Thumbnail: Greg and Amanda
Thumbnail: Trolley
Thumbnail: A shot in the mirror
Thumbnail: Signing
Thumbnail: Table settings
Thumbnail: Table six
Thumbnail: Karen in the dark
Thumbnail: Aaron drinks
Thumbnail: Three on the steps
Thumbnail: Final shot

At one point in the night I was run­ning around with my Karachi Outpost strapped on my back, and my cam­corder bag around my shoul­der, feel­ing like a one-man doc­u­men­tary team, even though my focus was on video instead of stills. There are a cou­ple of cam­era issues, such as focus and zoom speed that still bug me when I watch the footage, but until I can afford a Canon XL2 my cheap Hitachi DVD-cam will have to do.

Surprisingly, the eas­i­est part was pick­ing the song, some­thing that can take days itself. I needed a sin­gle track that would work through land­scapes, kiss­ing, and drink­ing, three things that evoke vastly dif­fer­ent emo­tions, and Tulips by Bloc Party was per­fect. Even the tim­ing of the lyrics worked out. I wish I could say that I was able to obtain a score for the music, ana­lyze it, and symet­ri­cally break down the scenes accord­ing to the devel­op­ment. To be hon­est I just didn’t have enough footage, so I just put what I could in the parts that would fit, with­out inter­rupt­ing the flow of the story.

The entire clip took about three solid days to com­plete, half of which was just get­ting the scenes in the right for­mat to work with in Adobe Premier 2.0. I was plagued by video for­mat prob­lems and asyn­chro­nous audio issues. It was also the first time I was able to try this lat­est ver­sion of Premier since I was run­ning 1.5 for a while. The process really pushed the capa­bil­i­ties of my sys­tem; load­ing only Premier with the whole sequence took up 1.6 gigs of RAM. Render time was about 20 min­utes on a dual-core AMD 4400+. Uncompressed video size is almost 2 gigs.

Influences were Michele Gondry from the Hardest Button To Button video, as well as the smart and witty stylings of Spike Jonze.