There’s a special place in hell for marketers who use Valentine’s day to guilt trip you into spending money, when the most heartfelt (and cheapest) thing you could do is send your sweetie a video. Carded.tv and blinkBox (among many others) will let you send a pre-fab video greeting, and if you don’t have a crush handy, maybe send some love to one of the kids at Stuff We Like.

SplashCast and Jumpcut are great way to assemble photos and clips online the way I once wooed crushes with mixed tapes. But if you’re handy with animation or editing software, here’s some more videos that offer some great visual inspiration for making your own special Valentine’s greeting that much more of a tearjerker.

The best Valentine’s video I’ve found so far is this one animating love notes submitted to PostSecret. Earnest and sincere, but not too cloying, it shows that the handmade, heartfelt love letter is the best gift you could possibly get — and that animating even the crudest hand-drawings is a great visual effect. (via Laughing Squid)

The object of many a geek’s affection, Mahalo Daily’s Veronica Belmont, teaches you some French phrases and shows that it’s not necessarily what you say, but how you say it — everyone’s sexier in French and in black and white. Heart wipes and cupids? Not so much.

A fracas with Flickr and Playbody caused London vlogger Mike Atherton to ruminated on the importance of archiving in this digital world — after all, you don’t want your special moments to disappear with a broken hard drive or an account suspension! He also found this great music video for Plus/Minus’s Lets Build a Fire that tells a touching story in animated stills of burning Polaroids.

OK, somebody hand me a tissue.