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