Nick And Ali's Wedding

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.


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.

5 comments

  1. FINALLY
    a new entry (hehe­he)

    like the video..a tad long for some­one who knows nobody in the video.
    But the song was great, your tran­si­tions were super and the flow was smooooth.
    Well done.
    I like using Priemier Pro.
    I’m also ‘into’ vedio edit­ing.
    I’ve edit­ed a full length extreme mtn. bik­ing movie (avail­able on dvd ) :)
    some wed­ding videos, birth videos and oth­er such events.(it’s a great ‘present’ to give back..a com­plet­ed ‘movie’..my friends LOVE it!
    wish I could show you a sam­ple of my editing..but helas, not sure how to put it up on my site..I’d need to add anoth­er media play­er.
    it’s free msn..so it’s lim­it­ed some­what.

    Premier Pro works great..but it’s defi­nat­ley a dif­fer­ent for­mat than the old­er ver­sions.

    have a great week­end
    nice cam­era work!

    cheers! amy

  2. Jeff,

    Vid looks great! So do the stills. Thanks for putting so much work into all this. I hope that some­where in there you remem­bered to have fun… We real­ly had a blast thanks to all our friends who made the trip down to wine-coun­try.

    Cheers,

    Nick

  3. I thought the video was love­ly! The angles were a nice touch and the song choice was absolute­ly per­fect… I found myself singing along (I love Bloc Party!). :)

  4. Hi Jeff. It’s been awhile. I see you’ve moved the fur­ni­ture around. Very nice! :-)

    Loved this video and the pho­tog­ra­phy sprin­kled through the last dozen or so entries. You have such amaz­ing tal­ent and cre­ativ­i­ty. And your writ­ing, man, it still makes me catch my breath at times.

    Thanks for the men­tion a few entries back and for the inspi­ra­tion that con­tin­ues every time I step in to vis­it.

    Enjoy the sum­mer with your love­ly lady,

    Barb :-)

Leave a Reply to Amy Cancel reply