“There’s no need to go overboard” were the last words I heard from my husband as I began researching our wedding. If his hopes for me were to take a relaxed approach to event planning then he didn’t stand a chance. Before the ring was on my finger I had already researched so many different aspects of the wedding and there was such a limited amount of time to get my “razzle dazzle” on.

One of the areas that I knew I wanted to stand out was with the invitation. In my opinion the invitation was the gateway piece to the wedding and should be treated just as importantly as the wedding itself. Besides the Save-The-Date, it was the first official extension of the wedding that entered people’s homes and invited them to attend the event and if I wasn’t going to half-ass the wedding then I wasn’t going to half-ass the debut!

During my research I stumbled on a cute blog called Red Prairie Press and fell in love with their DIY wedding invite. (In fact if you look down in the comment section I was one of the 50 people asking how they did it!).

Without any response I made it my mission to make my own cartoon invitation which would be similar, but include a touch of Katie sparkle. I wanted my wedding to be “an experience” from the get go. And what better way to do that then providing entertainment from the start?

I went searching on Etsy.com for a DIYer to help me assemble a DVD case invitation to house the wedding details and DVD. I stumbled upon the PictoonCards shop who hand creates DVD cases. I knew that with the right direction we would be able to transform her hand-made cases into the perfect invitation. And we did!

Once the invitation design was in place I knew I had to go through with making the cartoon. I spent a few days on it and after almost 50 slides I hit play and only had about 45 seconds of video. I showed the beginning of it to my friend Nicole and said, “Well, at least I know I can do it. But I’m done with this project it is going to take too long.”

Her response was something along the lines of “The hell you are.. you will finish this cartoon because it is too damn cool for you not to!”… I slowly went back to the computer and kept working away. I guess I was past the turn around point.

In the end I developed a four-minute production (387 slides) using computer paper, colored pencils, a scanner and Mac iMovie starring Joe, Myself and our lovely 17 pound cat Dexter

Dexter our cat.. isn't he so cute?!?

*Sidebar: iMovie is the most amazing free application that comes standard on a Mac. By inserting a sequence of cartoon clips and setting the run-time speed of each clip  less than 1/2 a second iMovie played each slide so fast that it made the cartoon move (i.e. come to life). I also believe Windows Live Movie Maker does the same thing.

So sit back and enjoy. Lights, Camera… ACTION!

Thursday, May 10th, 2012, 2:57 AM   |   Weddings  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback