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After a busy bank holiday weekend involving three family shoots and a wedding our photographer’s thoughts this week have mostly centred around why photographers really really need sleep. So whilst Dominique takes a well-earned snooze I thought I’d intervene with some thoughts of my own this week not on photography as such but on my own medium – Wedding Cinematography.
Weddings are incredibly expensive to organise and without the luxury of a limitless budget you can’t always get everything you’d like. So why should having a wedding video be one of the things you need to prioritise?
Wedding videos have undergone a lot of changes in recent years. The traditional style you might associate with the wedding video – that long, drawn-out coverage from the back of the church with a massive camcorder has, by and large, gone to be replaced by something altogether more, well…cinematic!
Nowadays when creating wedding videos we’re not just aiming to create something that will be interesting to watch once every few years for the couple themselves but to create a short film telling the story of the wedding day in a way that’s exciting enough to want to watch over and over, not just for the couple but for their friends and family as well. The lines between photography and cinematography are blurring and cinematographers are adopting photographic techniques to try to capture the same magical moments as the photographs, but in a moving and audio enriched form.
Great photography captures real emotion, real truth in every frame. But if a photograph shows us a snapshot of the moment, a film reveals the rest of the story. It shows you the moments you missed, the moments you want to capture forever and the moments that are only possible to capture in video form. It combines the power of the images with the emotion of the soundtrack, the excitement of the music and every syllable of joy in the words spoken on the day. It’s a unique record of a momentous occasion, and one you can continue to enjoy long after the last guest has left at the end of the night.
“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
– Jean-Luc Godard
For a lot of people being in front of a still camera is nerve-wracking enough, and so it’s no surprise that you wouldn’t want to be spotted on a camera that captures your every movement and everything you say. Really this comes down to a level of trust between the couple and the individual videographer. You have to trust that your videographer, just like your photographer, is looking to make you look the best they can and has no interest in showing you moments that might embarrass you or make you feel self-conscious. Their job is to create something that you will want to watch over and over, not something that’s going to embarrass or upset you. It’s also important to realise that technology has moved on and video cameras no longer have to be huge and obvious – in fact a lot of cinematographers are now using exactly the same cameras as your photographers, allowing them to remain discrete and help you to forget they’re even there. Most importantly though a good videographer will, just like your photographer, aim to put you at your ease and help you to relax in front of the camera.
It’s not just the recording technology that has changed though, as well as creating full length films a lot of videographers will also create short “trailers” or shorter versions of the full film designed to be shared on Facebook or copied to your phone or tablet. Its amazing the excitement you can capture in just a few minutes on film and the emotion that a short piece of video can provoke. You can stream your wedding film in full high definition quality in a way that was never possible before and share it with all your guests as well as those who couldn’t be there online.
So if video is something you’ve not considered then take a look at what’s out there, don’t let preconceptions get in your way. The magic of film isn’t just limited to the cinema, this is your chance to be the star of the big screen in the most iconic film you’ll ever see.
” We call it the invisible art. Because the more invisible we are, the better we are doing our job”
– Craig Mckay, Film Editor
