You could hear the panic in her voice.

It was just  few days before her wedding and Patti was frantic on the other end of the phone. The person she had asked to videotape her wedding had a scheduling conflict and was not going to be able to make it. Could I possibly figure out a way to do it and photograph everything at the same time?

I smiled to myself and said sure. We would take care of it.

Patti had no way of knowing, but I had been planning to do at least some limited filming of the wedding ever since she had booked us months earlier. I had been wanting to explore the power of Fusion — the merging of film/video and still photography to create artistic content. It’s an idea that has been around forever, having been used effectively by people like Ken Burns in his Civil War and Baseball PBS series. But with the advent of DSLR cameras that will shoot video, it has begun to make its way into the wedding photography business.

I’ve seen some incredible examples of wedding videos that combine the Fusion techniques with cinematic editing to produce a product that is, in a word, stunning. Gone are the days of boring, one camera start-to-finish wedding videos. Brides can literally be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, complete with the music and trailer. It was something that I desperately wanted to see if I could pull off.

Patti gave me the chance. I shared a lot of her photos a while back, but I didn’t really give the whole story then. In addition to myself and LaDonna, who were behind the still cameras, our crew included our assistant Wayne, who handled behind the scenes stuff such as getting a wedding day slideshow ready for the reception, and his parents Steve and Becky, who did all of the videography for us. The five of us literally ran from the time we got there at about 10 in the morning, until we left the reception at about 10 that night.

What we got was a pretty incredible mix of stills and video. I’ve taken the best of it and edited into a five-minute presentation of what the power of Fusion can create. We would love to create the same thing for you.

[vimeo width=”800″ height=”450″]http://www.vimeo.com/22009465[/vimeo]