The secret is in the details #1: The Invitation

There are a number of "secrets" that only my husband and I, sometimes a few others, were privy to during our wedding. I swore I would blog about it and actually attempted to create a full blog page on the subject but somehow, it just made it all the more difficult to tell the story that way.

So I'm trying again here. At the very least, there are tags and all related posts will be fairly easy to find.

The shells and beads surrounding our names reflect the
ocean theme from which we derived our motif.
(c) Noel Salazar, Imagine Nation Photography

The first secret is not quite a secret but a detail that was apparently rather obscure.

This is the title page of our invitation. I call it a title page because our invitation was, in fact, inspired by books.

And straight off, no, I did not hand-write the script. It is a font called Arcana.

Our invitation was a very, very plain red on the outside, in the style of hardbound books with the dust jacket removed. On the inside, we used parchment paper and by fortuitous copier flaws, some of the text came out either very strongly inked or slightly faded, giving the impression of an old, hand-inked sheet of parchment.

Though our motif was ocean-inspired, blue only appeared
on our  Bible, cord, offertory candles, and reception hall.
(c) Gracielle Hernandez, Imagine Nation Photography

For those interested, yes, you can photocopy on parchment paper. Just make sure it's a good, heavy parchment (I believe I used 80gsm) and your photocopier is willing to run it for you. If you, the reader, are from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, State U will be happy enough to do that for you with the aforementioned caveat of possible fading. Make sure you bring more paper than you need so that if it fades too much, you at least have more copies to work with.

For those who might not be aware of why it's labelled "Book Two," we consider "Book One" to have been from the time we first met up to that final month before we made our engagement official. (In Filipino terms, the pamamanhikan.) I might eventually share our "Book One" photos here but for now, we'll put up the wedding ones.

Invitation images above and below
(c) Noel Salazar, Imagine Nation Photography

Still in the spirit of books, we also included copyright and production details on the invitation.

The copyright details is, in its own right, a prayer, as denoted by the last line of the copyright. There are so many things that we went through over the years (we were wed on the eve of our 5th anniversary/beginning of our 6th year together) that can really only be expressed the way it was written. Fellow geeks of ours had a good laugh at the copyright section because of the second to the last line.

There are two suppliers who were not in the production notes--I regret that I could not find a way to word their inclusion so that it would still appear bookish. Instead I will name them in later images when they appear. Other members of Noel's team were not written there either as I had no idea yet who the other photographers and videographers would be. Also, the images enclosed in the invitation were all Noel's work anyway. So the others on the documentation team will also be credited as I post. ^_^

For those who may have noticed that so far, only Noel's and Gracielle's shots have appeared on my blog, I requested another copy of Cherry's shots because the DVD wouldn't load properly. -.-

(c) Noel Salazar, Imagine Nation Photography

In a strange way, I do have the Hannah Montana series to thank for this next one.

The song "Bless the Broken Road" by Rascal Flatts was featured in the Hannah Montana movie. It was the first time I'd heard the song and my immediate reaction was that the song's story seemed to apply quite perfectly to our story. I had Lester listen to it and he agreed. Click here for the lyrics.

We used the song twice for our wedding. The first is on the "dedication page" of our invitation (seen here on the right) and the second was for our entrance. I found out a few days after the ceremony that the ensemble we hired played an instrumental version of the song for the entrance of the entire entourage. It was only during my own entrance that the singer began his performance.

The final invitation "secret" is our signature.

We actually used this several times throughout the celebration. It is a combination of the monogram I designed and our ambigram (made via this website).

If you've already seen that particular logo/signature, you might wonder where the monogram is.

(c) Noel Salazar, Imagine Nation Photography

This is one of the shots where the monogram is easiest to spot. For me anyway since I was the one who put together this whole image. ^.^

If you tilt your head slightly to the left, you'll notice that the heart isn't quite a heart but an exaggerated L/stylized R.

It took me a while to perfect the entire monogram and truth be told, I didn't notice at first either that it looked like a heart. It took me several tries to get the loops right (and I had to do it on my smartphone's paint application) and make the brush strokes resemble our ambigram more closely.

Believe me when I say that I didn't even know what an ambigram was until I started looking for a good way to sign off on our invitation. If the word is as new to you as it had been to me, here's the Wiki on it.

For the ambigram, it took me a little over four hours to perfectly combine our names. What made it easier is the fact that my name starts with the last letter of his. ^_~ Flipped upside-down, it will still read "lesterosa" as it does right way up.

This teaser image was actually taken from two different
shots: my solo and his. I Photoshopped it to make this
combined image. Original images for both are
(c) Noel Salazar, Imagine Nation Photography

The final "secret" of the invitation is a note we included saying that guests should bring the photos enclosed in the invitation. (Teaser image on the right.) It actually gave the impression that they would not be able to enter the reception area without the invitation (so sorry!) but the truth is that the photos served as their guide to which table they were assigned.

There were three things that backfired on us that day and the first and second items are related to the seating.

The first was that we miscalculated the guests' off dates from work and assumed that all Christmas parties would be done by the 22nd. Based on that, we pre-assigned and sent ahead everyone's table assignments. The second part to this is that we assumed that during cocktails, they would actually walk around the different tables.

Oi.

Ultimately we found out that no one got to see the whole story so I ended up posting everything on Facebook, haha!

And so, presenting the final invitation "secret," Lester and Rosa Book One.