Dear Peoples of the Internetz

First off, we want to say a big hello to all the random people who have stumbled upon our little save-the-date video. We're quite overwhelmed by all the love coming in from the vast expanse of the intertubes. And we appreciate all your kind words and even enjoy reading the hysterical comments by the haters.

If you are friends or family and have no idea what we're talking about... it seems that our video is going viral:
The Huffington Post
Boing Boing
Offbeat Bride

We've been getting a lot of questions about the video, so we thought we'd take the opportunity to answer some of them. First off, our video was NOT done professionally (except for the voice-over, more on that later). Second, this was NOT a high budget production, except for the use of a nice DSLR which we already owned. And as should be obvious, this video was only ever intended for friends and family.

This started off as something that was going to be a small project, a video announcement that we would shoot in a weekend. But as we started working on it, we started coming up with more ideas and were having more and more fun with it. And as you can tell, we just got carried away.

We wanted to do the most over-the-top action movie trailer parody we could think of, so we had to have the big movie-trailer voice! But who did we know who could pull this off? How can we process the voice to make it sound like the "voice of God"? After some research, we realized that the only way to really pull it off was to hire a real voice actor. We found Larry Wayne and sent in our script full of every cliche we could think of. He liked the idea and agreed to do it for a VERY reasonable cost. Once he sent back the audio file, we were blown away! Now, how could the video live up to the standards set by the voice-over?

So we figured... what better way to achieve the epic effect we were after than to walk away from explosions? But renting a green screen studio was just not in our budget. How about a green wall? After some flickr-ing, we found this green wall, not far from us! With the help of street view, we tracked down the building and started filming!



Some of the other chroma key shots were done by hanging up a sheet in our friend's apartment!



Everything that was obviously not from a movie we filmed ourselves (with some help from our friend Matt), using a Canon 5D Mark II. It was all edited using Premiere and After Effects on a regular PC. We did most of the title and text effects ourselves, except for the intro 20th Century Fox spoof. A template for that was created in Blender by some cool guy on the internet called Blazer003... we just followed his tutorial.

As for the "evil" cat, she is actually very sweet; her name is Eski, but unfortunately she's not ours, but was graciously lent to us by our friends Ian and Sam. The grand piano scene was made possible thanks to a colleague Peter, who allowed us an hour in the recording studio where he volunteers in his spare time. The Vietnamese subtitles were done by another colleague, Son, whose mastery of the Vietnamese language far exceeds my own.

Maybe we'll post some behind-the-scenes footage some day, but for now, we'll leave you with these screenshots.


Uncooperative cat!


Falling on my butt in front of strangers.


Butting heads... ouch!


Trying to look cool while walking away from a green wall in slow motion!