Valentine Ecards
E Cards and Videos for Valentines Day

Valentine Ecards on Valentines Day can be a special way to celebrate the holiday of love. There are lots of places to make Valentines Ecards, many of them free, but if you want to do something different and more personal, you can make your own "from scratch."

For my Valentines Day E Card, I made a Valentine video, mostly from pictures of flowers. For this video, I wanted to borrow (legally) the works of others and put them together, rather than creating everything on my own (as I have done in some of my other video projects). So, I searched around for "public domain" and "free royalty-free" media — photos, music, and poetry.

Valentine Ecard Video: i carry your heart with me

a poem by ee cummings

For Valentine's Day 2012, "Na Pali," a trip-hop video that I created, was released as part of Stephen Webber's Stylus Symphony project. It isn't primarily a Valentine video, but it fits the season.

Regular "royalty free" doesn't mean it's necessarily free. You just don't have to pay each time you use it. You may, however, have to pay to initially get it.

Also, CC or Creative Commons is a nice alternative to regular copyrighted works, but they often have restrictions against commercial use, derivative works, etc.

I was curious to see what I could get legitimately for free, no strings attached.

In the Valetine ecard video below, I found (actually, my daughter found first) a wonderful poem by ee cummings, "i carry your heart with me" (old enough to be in the public domain), a gorgeous free song by Kevin MacLeod, and a number of public-domain images from a variety of sources, thanks to a Google search.

Kaleidography

My other goal, besides using other people's free stuff, was to do the entire video in "kaleidography" — in this case, 6-sided mirror images. All of the images are still photos, but the mirror reflection combined with slow panning creates a lot of interesting patterns and movement.

It's all put together in Sony Vegas Movie Studio, a great little program. For the kaleidoscope effect, I used the "Mirror" Video FX, repeated multiple times at specific angles to get the 6-sided "snowflake" look I was going for. Panning across the images created the exploding (or imploding) effects.

I'm very happy with the way it turned out. My wife, Lori, liked it too. :)

Make Your Own Valentine Ecard

To make your own Valentine ecard video, you could do basically what I did — that is, find (or create or make):

• A nice poem
• Some beatiful music
• Some romantic images

and put them all together.

Get Personal

Assuming this Valentine ecard is for someone in particular, you could use images of him/her, or you, or both of you together. Or images of favorite places, or favorite scenes, or just "pretty things." (Valentines Day is the one day when mushiness rules.)

If you use a popular song that has words (as most of them do), you don't even need a poem, since it has one built-in. That way, you have your basic "photo slideshow with a romantic song in the background" — not very exciting or original, but quick and easy to do. And still probably better than a box of chocolates.

To get really personal, you could make a video of you reading a poem. Or talking about when you first met, or about your favorite things about each other — that sort of thing. Lay a little instrumental music in the background, and you could have a winner.

Whatever you do, make your Valentine ecard a reflection of you, or him/her, or both of you together. And have fun!