Me, that’s who. On Thanksgiving Eve I proposed to my girlfriend of 4 years and she said yes.
After deciding to have a private proposal, the planning began, 3 months in the making. I told Angie I wanted to back up our photos, so she gave me her external drive (she’s taken lots of pictures during our relationship). I sorted them as moments through the years and started the editing process. First thing, I needed music. Well, I’m a composer. So I made a new updated version of a song I wrote for her 4 years ago. I wrote completely new music for the beginning and then brought in the familiar tune (she realises this at 2:07).
I was only able to work on the song when she wasn’t home, once a week, because I was paranoid that she would hear it through my headphones. On the final version I did a mastering process to make it sound the best it possibly could through my PC speakers.
After the song was complete I started putting the video together, again working on it once a week, because when I tried to work on it while she was home, she’d walk into the room and I would quickly change program windows on my computer and act all casual, but I started to wonder if Angie might have thought I was watching porn. After many revisions to the video the next part was how to record her reaction so we can share it with friends and family.
I setup my webcam and ran “rehearsals” of where she would be seated and where I would be standing, adjusting for height. I tested to make sure my PC could handle recording video while playing it, success! Then I ran into a glitch, the webcam had to be positioned behind the speakers, which meant the audio of my proposal would have been drowned out by the music. Solution: Record audio separately via Voice Recorder on my iphone, using the headphone mic as source placed towards the front of my desk close to where my head would be when proposing, then sync it with the music audio in post.
Another problem, now the mic was in front of the speakers and the audio would still drown out the proposal, so I went into the video editing program and faded down the music for the time that I would propose and then fade back up to after she would have said yes (hopefully). I re-rendered the video and did another rehearsal. It worked like a charm!
On the day of the proposal (my boss let me work from home) I called Angie’s dad early to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he said “Of course!” and sounded a bit choked up, and he gave me his blessing. One “yes” down, one more to go! I waited to the same day of the proposal to ask him because it sucks to hold a secret from people when you’re dying to tell them and I didn’t want to put him through keeping it a secret for too long, so I told him “before you go to bed tonight you will get a call”.
This was planned to be a “trifecta”: video of memories, a new edition of her song and of course, the proposal. It was a stressful 3 months, and when the moment came I was extremely nervous, as she was watching the video next to me I felt my heart pounding. My main thought was not to let go of the ring box in my pocket once I located the hinge so I don’t open it backwards, and not to miss my cue, and the whole time my brain was like “OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG”, pretty much why I look statuesque in the video lol. However, all’s well that ends well 🙂