A dynamite wedding or event DVD is more than a mere composition that excites the soul. The packaging it is released in must be dynamite. We put together a sample 3d video that illustrates a stunning DVD case jacket.
Professional Graphics for Your DVD Release from W. Cardone Productions on Vimeo.
We received word last week that W. Cardone Productions has been selected to receive a “2010 Pick: The Knot Best of Weddings” award.
Shown here is a sneak peak of the ad we will have in the January issue of Premier Bride magazine.
A marriage proposal is a once-in-a-lifetime event that a couple will want to remember for a lifetime. Even more, a couple will want to share the event with others not only in the days and months before the wedding but even years down the road.
Imagine recreating scenes from that proposal and telling the details of it to show on cinema! The proposal would be immortalized for generations even yet unborn.
Presented here is the story of a marriage proposal made by Merrick Miranda to Katie Darnell. As you watch the story notice first the tender moments presented before the discussion where Katie and Merrick spend time together enjoying nature and each other’s presence at a scenic park with mood enhancing timeless music. Here the viewer becomes acquainted with Katie and Merrick so that when viewing their story a heart-felt joy will be experienced.
By way of interest, please notice what some may take to be a paid advertisement for a seafood restaurant. While it may have the appearance of a paid advertisement, the purpose is in memory preservation for the couple. Ten or more years down the road seeing these things will bring back cherished memories. We are doing more than telling a story. We are capturing memories for generations.
Every wedding we capture memories in motion at is unique and even moving. It never grows commonplace. Please take 4 minutes and view highlights of Katie and Merrick Miranda’s wedding from May 16th. This has moved some to tears!
Please feel free to leave your comments after viewing.
There are important distinctions that exist between house audio or public address and cinematic.
House audio must be optimized for understandability in a room that has dynamic auditory characteristics. Sometimes people are coughing, children may be excited, someone may be sitting next to sound absorbing curtains while another may be sitting against a bare wall reflecting sounds, and the list goes on. To optimize understandability a public address system will therefore have a narrow band of frequencies it will put on the loudspeakers usually centered around 3,000Hz, optimum for the human voice. Cinematic audio, or audio for television, serves an audience of just a few people in a relatively small room. Under these conditions the audio is much easier to understand. This leaves room for a much wider band of frequencies enabling a more natural and rich sound.
Capturing audio from a variety of church sound systems we have noticed the practical effect of all this. The sound we typically capture from a house sound board sounds fine in a video until you compare it with audio we captured at the same event with our own microphone systems.
Please view below a sample video illustrating the differences between a typical house audio system and audio for cinema. In the video you will see a pastor delivering a wedding message to a couple during their wedding ceremony. The pastor is double miked wearing both a house microphone and one of our wireless microphones.
The video is in HD high definition so if your bandwidth is too slow click on the HD icon to switch to standard definition. Please bear in mind that this is raw video and not necessarily representative of the quality we release.
It is extremely rare that a wedding or event can transpire from beginning to end without somebody making a mistake somewhere. What is worse is when something unfortunate happens during a significant event that you had wanted to cherish for a lifetime. Your videographer can only capture what transpires and cannot turn 
the clock back to have your wedding party perform their part again without the mistake. After all, your videographer is only human. …or is he? Maybe he has abilities far beyond those of mortal man, is able to jump across tall buildings with a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet, etc.
Technology allows us to do amazing things in the edit room that just might persuade you that your videographer has abilities far beyond those of mortal man. In the example to follow we captured the lighting of a unity candle by mothers of the bride and groom. The mothers made a mistake. They were not supposed to actually light the unity candle. Their task was to light two individual candles which the bride and groom would later use during the wedding ceremony to light the unity candle. For the plain and simple video of the ceremony we will just show what happened at the wedding. However, when we develop the music highlights video, artistically composed from events of the entire day, we want to avoid triggering unfavorable memories and center on developing those which warm the heart and will continue to warm the heart ten or more years down the road.
So, what are we supposed to do? We could simply leave out the mothers lighting the candles which would be ashamed as this is symbolic of families joining. What we did was not change the story but simply remove a part of the image which would draw attention and the viewer’s eyes to a mistake. Viewers will still know what happened but at least the showing of the candle lighting in the music highlights video will not be highlighting a mistake.
Please watch the twenty-seven second video below where you will see the actual footage of the candle lighting and then you will see how a portion of that same footage was used in the music highlights video.
When we capture memories in motion at weddings we are careful to observe what memorable services vendors are providing at the wedding. One such especially memorable event was a horse drawn carriage ride at a wedding we did in May provided by Ann Arbor Carriage.
On June 6 we had the distinct honor to capture the memories in motion of Kimberly and Atticus as they captured their dreams in matrimony at Zion Lutheran Church of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Atticus Flores, U of M ‘02 graduate, of Canton, Michigan, proposed to Kimberly Ellsworth, also a U of M ‘02 graduate, during a romantic fall picnic in the Arboretum. Kimberly is a graphic designer at the U-M Law School. Atticus is an automotive product engineer at Plastech.
The staff and pastors of Zion were very helpful in helping us to capture wedding video memories that will serve this couple a lifetime. Of particular help was the church AV technician who went out of his way to assure that our site audio feed was superlative.
One technical issue we had to grapple with at Zion was the mixture in the sanctuary of outdoor daylight with indoor lighting. I am pleased to report that we had incredible success in overcoming this limitation. While photographers find this easy to deal with, videography imaging is challenged by it.
Digital imaging, whether still or video, must be balanced for the color or temperature of predominant light in a room. Once balanced, the light entering the imaging device cannot change its temperature without causing an objectionable change to the hue. While we can correct this in the edit room, results will be better if the original capture is balanced for color. For still imaging the photographer merely “swamps out” the ambient light with a flash. For video the problem surfaces when the camera frame moves from an area of one color to an area of another color. Such was the case at Zion Lutheran Church.
The sanctuary at Zion is architecturally divided between front and rear with a baptistery in the middle. Zion requirements for video and photography dictate that we cannot operate during the wedding ceremony any closer to the altar than the baptistery. The color of light for the rear half was predominantly daylight while the front was tungsten. This, therefore meant that to follow the processional of the bridal party down the isle a fundamental color shift occurred at about the middle. Our solution was to have one camera dedicated to following each celebrant down only half of the isle. The camera on the right covered the processional only until the middle and the camera on the left picked them up from the middle and followed them to the altar.
This, however, was not the end of the problem. The camera on the right, balanced for daylight, had to swing into a tungsten colored frame at the conclusion of the entry processional. Fortunately, our cameras are bi-modal for color. For the camera on the right we solved for two separate color balances before the ceremony. When it was then time for that camera to swing into a tungsten frame a simple switch was flipped for the alternate color balance.
At the reception, Kensington Court Hotel, we had an opportunity to view samples of the photographer’s work and decided it was excellent.
We were particularly impressed, however, with the live entertainment Kimberly and Atticus had selected for their reception. “Two for the Road,” Vincent Vitale and Brian Bogozzi, were very creative in providing live family oriented entertainment and dance music. These two knew how to engage an audience, keep them informed of events of the evening, and provide for a memorable reception. We highly recommend Two for the Road and have added them to our link resources web page.
In addition, Brian and Vincent went out of their way in helping us to capture stunning audio for the couple’s video. At reception or dinner events where toasts or other speaking activities take place, we attempt to secure an audio line from the DJ to feed an audio recording device. This frees us from having to individually mike speakers or handing them a second handheld microphone to awkwardly grapple with. The price we pay for this, however, is a dependency on the DJ to send us quality audio. While we always have redundant audio sources for these events, the primary audio source is preferred and “Two for the Road” gave us pristine audio for Kimberly and Atticus’ video.
A nice touch the couple provided for their wedding reception guests was a shutter photo booth where guests could have their photographs taken.