Received an e-mail over the weekend from Kim and Herb, who’s wedding I completed a few weeks ago…

The video is absolutely wonderful; we’re sooo pleased with it!  It really captures the special moments of our amazing day.  Thank you for paying such careful attention to the small details that were so meaningful.  Your talent is obvious, your critical eye impeccable.  We can easily recommend you to anyone as a quality, top-notch videographer who works with his clients to effectively capture the mood and the atmosphere.  Bravo!!

Received an e-mail from Nicole about her recently completed wedding…

“We got the video, we love it and think you did a really great job!”

Here is another clip from Nicole’s wedding. This is the first kiss at the end of the ceremony, which is always everyone’s favorite. I usually don’t put clips like this up, but its nice to have something fun every now and then.

If you watched the previous clip, the camera in the back has changed positions from the center to the right side behind the pews. Had to move it so that when everyone exited there was nothing in the way. This is actually the position I would normally put the camera, because as you can tell it’s a nicer angle, plus if someone stands in the center I can just zoom in close so that they are not in the shot. And it just shows off the alter better.

It’s a new angle to work with, therefore I tried to use as much of it as I can. I’m not Ron Popeil and don’t like to just set it and forget it, so during the ceremony rather than just leaving the camera at one set point, I zoom in and out for different shots to make things more interesting. For example, this ceremony was 40 minutes, so if you just kept on going back and forth the entire time between the same two shots it would get boring very quickly. It helps with the pacing without actually editing anything out.

As mentioned in the last post, the current wedding is Nicole’s. Her ceremony was a Greek Orthodox one. Orthodox weddings are somewhat different than traditional ceremonies, but being Orthodox myself, weddings like hers are more familiar to me that others. Except this one was almost all in english, which I am not used to hearing.

Some of the differences in Orthodox ceremonies is that the couple does not say anything, everything is done by the priest, so there is no exchange of vows or what one would consider a traditional ring ceremony. One of the other unique things about them is that for part of the ceremony the couple wears crowns, which is what the following clip is of. After the crowns are placed on the couple, they then circle around the alter 3 times. In some ceremonies the couple does not wear the crowns, but the best man and maid of honor hold them above the couples heads the entire time.

Anyhow here is the clip. I think it still will need some color correcting before it is final…

This ceremony is perhaps one of the most difficult I have ever edited. In Orthodox churches, the people attending do a lot of standing up and down, so the camera I had in back of the church had to be in the center of the aisle or it would be blocked 1/2 the time when everyone stood up. And since it is in the center, thats’s where everyone goes for pictures, so you get a lot of blocked shots there as a result as well, but not as much. It’s sort of a no win situation in that respect. As a result a lot of the ceremony involved just editing around all of that. Had to replace a lot of shots just to make it work, but not here in this clip.

Plus during the ceremony it changes from day to night, so the light is not the same the entire time, meaning there is a limited amount a footage you can steal from other spots that will match what you need at a particular point in time in terms of the light levels. Not to mention that the bride and groom throughout the ceremony change how they look (they put on the crowns, they hold candles at one point as well), so that also narrows down were you can get shots to cover certain things up.

I hope I am explaining this correctly.

When I shoot something I am always thinking how am I going to be able to make it work from a practical stand point, then when I start editing I think how am I going to make it work from a creative one, so I remember as I was shooting the ceremony thinking that I was going to need to do a lot a tricks to make it all come off as seamless, so at certain points I just concentrated the camera on the B&G so that I would have shots to cut away to.

The audio was really good though. The priest projects his voice so well that I hardly have to do any work on it, which is awesome because audio is the hardest thing to get right because you can’t cover up audio mistakes. Either it sounds good or it doesn’t.

Enjoy!

I had an epiphany today. Why always use different music when editing a video? Why not do it like they do in film and pick a piece of music each for both the bride and groom and use it as their theme throughout the video? And throughout the video when a moment involving one of them happens, use that piece of music for that particular scene? That’s how movies are scored- it’s their moment, so you use their music.

I think it’s a good idea, but unfortunately the practicality of it when doing weddings just is not there because it would just sound like you are using the same music over and over again. Not sure if that is something people would pick up on. I guess it’s the same idea as the first dance song. That’s the couples theme and when you hear it played, it makes you think of the couple every time. But using the first dance song in that manner in a video would not work. It’s an idea to think about though.

Anyway…

I know I have not been posting lately. Just have not had a chance for a number of reasons. One is that I recently got a new system, so I am now finally an Apple Intel chipset user. Burning disks and rendering effects are so much faster now. But I have officially returned.

This clip is from Nicole’s wedding. It is her coming out of the church after the ceremony has ended. Kind of quick. There is nothing really edited here, I just like the shot. Lots of flowers. I did do some very basic color correcting in the first 1/2 of it because it was night, so the shot had to be lightened up because they were too far away for my light to have any effect.

I am still sorting everything out and going through the footage (meaning trying to figure out what to do), so I am posting this before I have really made the first cut. It’s like they say, the first cut is always the hardest, mainly because when I start working on something I never know what am I going to do. I don’t just cut and paste or repeat everything with every wedding I do, so I really have to think about it when I work on something. But once I have the first 30 seconds or so worked out it starts to come pretty easily after that. That’s just the way I work because it works for me best. Sometimes I will hear a piece of music I really like and I will become inspired to pull something off really great and just cut to that piece of music. Sometimes I just start laying down shots one after another until something starts to form and just hack away and move stuff around until I have something I really like. That’s probably the purest form of editing.

Anyhow, I will be back soon with something that is actually edited.