MONTAGE MATRIMONIAL, PART II!

When Torrid Midnight and Water Rogers were amidst their wedding preparations, their friend Nephilaine Protagonist volunteered to create a video of the upcoming ceremony. This being Nephilaine, however, the end result was anything but a traditional marriage vid. (Downloadable here, about 24 megs.) Bandwidth and lag being what it is, during extremely popular events, her main challenge was to work around the occasional image choppiness, and stuttering avatar movements. Her workaround was to convert the footage into a color-saturated, slow motion montage-- a dreamy effect that turns technical troubles into assets.

"I used Digital Fusion (an EyeOn product) to time stretch some of the shorter scenes," Nephilaine explains, "then added a Soft Glow filter to it and in many of the scenes had a filter for adjusting the color saturation as well. Also, I used Digital Fusion to crop out the user interface, and to add in the text... The
transitions to white in the video, how it sort of blows out the color rather than just fading up-- I animated the sliders in the brightness/contrast filter to get that. Then I edited it together in Speed Razor."

The text running along the bottom of the video is taken directly from their wedding vows. "They were so moving," she explains, "so I knew I wanted to use them." During this scene, all we see is the couple, isolated by a white ivory background. "I didn't want anything to do with the world itself in those shots," Nephilaine explains to me, "just focusing on them, and what they had to say to and about each other."

Time-wise, all that effort didn't come cheap. "Production wise," says Nephilaine, "not counting the time I had to spend waiting on getting some of the tools I needed to do the video, I would say it took about a week to put together."