Phone camera captures hearts with a subway wedding video

Major portal Web sites offer a wealth of video editing tools these days and storage space to accommodate short video clips; some cell phones also allow people to edit clips they shoot through the phone’s camera. More and more such amateur video is now appearing on the Web; some of the clips have caused a buzz among Internet users here.
The latest example is some video of a young couple who married in a subway car. The ceremony was captured by another subway rider, posted on a private blog on Tuesday and began circulating immediately. The media picked up the heart-warming story, and two stars were born.
“I grew up an orphan and we’re too poor to afford a wedding hall, so we’re going to have our wedding here on subway line No. 5, where we first met,” a young man in the clip told the few people in the car as it roared through the tunnel. He asked someone in the car to officiate, but got no takers. So he recited a short vow and put a ring on his bride’s finger as she wept.
No one seems quite sure whether the clip is genuine or not, but that minor point didn’t slow down the speed with which the clip was passed on to other netizens.
“I felt so touched that I cried. I’m sure they’ll be happy,” wrote Lee Han-sol on one of the many online bulletin boards that carried links to the clip. On the Daum portal site, more than 6,000 persons had offered to donate money to send the couple on a proper honeymoon. But neither of the happy pair has come forward yet.
Blogs, Web logs for the uninitiated, have evolved from photo blogs quite naturally into video blogs. Portal Web sites now allow users to create and store clips of up to five minutes in length.
Some sites, like Damoim, carry things a step further and provide a separate search engine for finding video clips.
Those clips are becoming popular as entertainment because of several factors, but technological advances is the most important one.
“Cell phones have larger memory storage these days and better image quality, which enables people to film and store moving images that they can edit and immediately upload to the Internet,” said Do Hun, an official at SK Telecom, a mobile service provider.

by Wohn Dong-hee