SHEEPSHEAD BAY — It was a dream wedding — except the videographer was a reel jerk.
A Brooklyn bride and her dad are suing a Staten Island film company for more than $200,000, accusing the movie crew of failing to capture many of the special moments from her special day and, on the eve of the nuptials, threatening to pull out of the project.
Monica Nickchemny and her father, David Nickchemny, claims they paid $12,750 to Vizualaz LLC and its chief cinematographer, Igor Boshoer, to produce a well-edited documentary of her traditional Russian Jewish wedding.
Instead the video crew missed the couple signing their marriage contract and various toasts, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
The dad and daughter also claim in the lawsuit that Vizualaz flubbed the sound at key parts of the ceremony and later had to add in "sitcom-clapping sound effects" in place of the guests' applause and had to dub in a fake noise when the groom broke the glass with his foot.
The lawsuit claims that a year after the wedding, they received a subpar finished product — about 50 minutes worth of clips without any beginning, middle and end.
"They basically said, 'You didn't tell us you wanted to that," Monica Nickchemny, 26, recalled the film crew saying when she told them they missed important scenes. "I just thought, 'How could they have the nerve to say this?' They are being paid to do their job. I shouldn't have to."
"The actual product is terrible," Nickchemny's lawyer, Mikhail Usher, added. "She essentially lost a great deal of memories. It's not like she can redo it. It's gone."
Boshoer did not respond to a request for comment.
In August 2011, Monica says that she contracted with Vizualaz, then a new firm, for her Septmber 2012 wedding at the Crystal Palace in Livingston, N.J.
The bride, who lives in Sheepshead Bay, runs a wedding-dress boutique called Monica's Bridal with her family and had planned to show the finished video at her store.
The headaches began when she and her husband, Felix Komrash, had artistic differences with Vizualaz. As part of a traditional Russian wedding, the couple films a fictional love story about their romance that airs during the reception while guests wait for the hors d'oeuvre.
Vizualaz had proposed a bizarre story line with the groom playing a transvestite who tried to get a job at her family's shop. But the couple objected to the plot.
"It was a joke. It was really disrespectful," Nickchemny said. "It didn't characterize us at all."
The couple wanted a plot based on their favorite movie, "Coming to America."
The lawsuit claims that Vizualaz made a stink about the couple disliking the concept and threatened to scrap the whole project.
Eventually, the two sides reached an agreement, but problems persisted up until she walked down the aisle.
On the night before the wedding, the couple wanted to see the love story video to make sure there were no surprises. But Vizaualaz objected to their request and threatened to not shoot the ceremony.
"To threaten a bride with not having a wedding video the day before the wedding amounts to extreme and outrageous conduct," the lawsuit says.
The film firm did show up for the wedding, but with fewer crew members than promised, Nickchemny said. She also said the crew did a poor job of filming the wedding "out of spite."
Monica said she had planned to showcase the video at her bridal shop, but it was too bad to air.
"We expected the quality of work that we were paying for," she said.
