Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Epic Save the Date Video

For my 100th post, I decided to wait for something special.  This is my masterpiece, my Mona Lisa, my ultimate contribution to the wedding world.

About a minute-and-a-half ago, I sent out our Save the Date Video.

And it is awesome.

I really do not give a flying frak about the Save the Dates and neither does Daniel.  This was definitely not something either of us wanted to waste money on.  But once I saw this video, I knew that I wanted one that was just as awesome:



All right, so I'm not a professional editor, and ours is not actually this epic.  But it's still awesome!  My dad films movies for a living, and I was a film major, so I knew that between the two of us, we could pull a decent short film together.

I really wanted to do something unique, not the standard sequence of relationship pictures set to sappy music, but I still wanted to do something that would look good with low production values.  But that left the question of what we should do?  My first idea to simply tell the story of our relationship hit the waste basket when I realized it's actually sort of depressing (2 years apart, breaking off the engagement the first time--meh).  Then we thought maybe we could do a fusion of us and one of our favorite movies:  The Princess Bride.  But once I started trying to map it out, it just proved too difficult.  And then I had an idea.  A very different sort of idea.  Not at all your typical wedding idea, or even video idea, but something that just might work for one.  Have you seen the iPad commercials?  Here's our favorite:



I thought, why not make that into a video about us?  "Nicole and Daniel are" stuff about us and our relationship.  It would be short, easy, and totally unique.  Daniel loved it, and I started writing the script.

It took a fair amount of time, but we are very pleased with the result.  So without further ado, I present to you our epic iPad Commerical Save the Date Video:



OK, now I finally get to tell you about the super awesome thing that happened to us while we were shooting.  We did a lot of the shooting at the Disneyland Resort, and my friend (and bridesmaid) and I did some scouting while there a few days before.  I've always loved the wedding gazebo at the Disneyland Hotel, and with some encouragement from Bridesmaid M, I decided it would be a great place to fake get married.  However, we were filming in the middle of the Sunday of Veterans' Day weekend, so I figured the gazebo might be busy.  I had a back-up plan, a smaller gazebo at the hotel that we could use if there was a wedding going on.

Well, when we got there, we found the main gazebo all dressed up and a wedding party taking pictures nearby, but when we went to plan B, we discovered that the back-up gazebo was in the middle of their reception.  What ever were we to do?  Well...the wedding party was no longer in the ceremony area, they were busy taking pictures...and the main gazebo was deserted...so we took our chances and got the best fake wedding background EVER!  I feel a little bad taking advantage of someone else's wedding, but I don't think they noticed, and even though the clean-up guy totally saw us, he waited until we were done to do his thing and didn't say anything.  And we got the ultimate ending to our video!

I'm really happy with the way it turned out.  It's not exactly the same as the commercial, but I think it really works.  And it was nice to be making and editing movies again.  That was the best part of being a film major even though I didn't get to do much of it at Berkeley.

Soooooo, what do you think?  Oh!  And I really want it to go viral, so if you want to, you know, send it to people, post it on Facebook or Twitter, or share it on your blog or website, um, I don't mind :).

3 comments:

Classy Wedding by the Sea