Save the date!

Oh, film!

I think Molly was ready to put a dagger through the back of my head throughout the filming process. Our first attempt at doing stop motion with leaves was nothing short of disastrous.  As most people know, the most important thing about stop motion is keeping everything in the shot exactly the same, except for the new element you are adding, in this case, one new leaf for each frame. Unfortunately, we didn't realize just how important this was... the camera keened in and out with each shot, causing a severe feeling of motion sickness upon viewing. My attempts to budge Molly on subsequent weekends (it was a two person job!) went nowhere. October turned to November turned to December. The trees were quickly shedding their leaves, and our fall video for our fall wedding was about to become a bleak winter one. 

Sensing my despair, Molly agreed to another take. We were lucky to have my friend Jess take a series of rapid fire photos of us that we could piece together for another old-time-y, stop-motion effect. We were also lucky in that there was one tree with leaves left on it on our block, a brilliant yellow, so we had a fall-appropriate backdrop in which to stand in front of for the start of the video. 

The next day, we re-shot the stop-motion leaf-writing. While the leaves were a bit more desiccated than they had been the preceding month, there were still plenty to choose from. Molly had figured the perfect place to stand, and my job was to efficiently place each leaf on the pavement between shots. We had shot about 5 leaves this way when the winds began to gust.... oh crappp! We waited for a lull, started over, got about four leaves in and whoooooosh! the leaves scattered like an overturned Jenja tower. Motherf^*@#%*&^%!! With snow predicted the next day and our options rapidly dwindling, we did the only thing we could think of, we ran into the apartment and got a jar of Elmer's glue. Yeah, you heard me. We glued those motherfuckers to the sidewalk. 

What did we get for all our efforts? Oh you know, 1'11 of video. Don't anyone tell me I don't know how to suffer for art. ;)