Thrilled for You
A couple things you know for sure about your wedding: You absolutely adore every single human being who’s coming to celebrate with you (whether there are 30 of them or 300), and, you’re petrified that you won’t be able to spend enough time hanging out with them all. Weighing heavily on my mind is a solution all this … how will you record, capture, document, or otherwise bottle their presence so that once you’re out of that dress and that suit and those heels and that tie, you can relive the whole thing in really meaningful way?
The Seattle company Jackson Fish Market has a solution they’d like you to try. It’s called Thrilled for You, and they designed and built it (right up the street from my office, actually) so that you can set up your own web-cam enabled computer (must run MacOS) wherever you’d like at your reception and invite guests to record an unlimited number of video messages. Think: those video confessionals first made popular by The Real World — only, presumably, not about who got so drunk that they ended up in whose room but rather how wonderful it is to see you all grown up and gorgeous next to the love of your life and who Uncle Bob danced with what they thought of the Yakima cab and the triple chocolate torte. You know, how thrilled they are for you.
You can customize the interface so that it feels personal and looks pretty; guests’ heartfelt shout-outs go straight to your hard drive so that later, you can watch them over and over on your 26-hour honeymoon flight to Fiji, upload the best ones to YouTube, or have your videographer edit them into his or her footage. Or you can host your own film festival and screen the things on a white sheet in your living room with your family and bridal party on your one-year anniversary. Just an idea. It’s up to you.
There’s a video here that shows how it all works, and if you’d like, you can download a demo from the Thrilled for You site and give it a test run — maybe record messages for each other and see if you can tug some heart strings.