As a wedding photographer, it makes a change to go to a wedding as a guest. Last year Clare & I joined our good pals Rob & Nikki at their wedding, and as I’d been essentially told I couldn’t take all my toys and spend all day snapping, I decided to road-test the HD video on my Canon 5DmkII camera (which to the uninitiated shoots both stills and video). As their wedding gift, I created a short summary of their fun wedding set to music > vimeo.com/5711774
I don’t really claim to be a pro-videographer, but off the back of that video I’ve had various bookings to create similar movies for clients. A bridesmaid at Rob & Nickki’s wedding pointed me out to Carly & Joe, & they asked me along to make something similar at their big day at Arley Hall in Cheshire.
To get us both into the swing of things (as I’d never really filmed a couple before) we met at Arley Hall for a practice pre-wedding video (which I turned into a wedding teaser for them > vimeo.com/12000762)
So on the day we were blessed with not only the stunning National Trust grounds of Arley Hall, but when we needed it, sunshine too!
Here are our lovely couple in one of the few stills we shot.
And here is their wedding video! Braces on… I hope y’all enjoy.
What a beautiful wedding party eh?!
The music in the video is ‘All You Need is Love’ by Lynden David Hall (from the love actually soundtrack, available at Amazon here) and ‘Have A Nice Day (Acoustic) by the Stereophonics (from the seemingly super difficult to find ‘The Chill Out’ compo, referenced here)
It was great to work with a cool, accommodating set of photographers on the day too. Here are Hannah & Abigail of funkyphotographers.com. Hannah can’t be miles off giving birth soon too, so fingers crossed to her!
The true legend of the day was my 3B Media homie Rob Booker, who stepped up to help me shoot. He’s a star and great company at all shoots.
The geeks of you out there (self confessed or otherwise) may be interested in our video setups. Book had his 5DmkII on our 3B•Media Manfrotto 503 Pro fluid head and some sturdy manfrotto legs and used a mixture of lenses, but primarily the 24-70mm f/2.8 & 70-200mm IS f/2.8, dropping things down to the 50 f/1.4 for the dancing. Most of the panning shots in the video are courtesy of the Bookers.
This was my rig!
Whoop.
It’s mad the mechano style action you can graft onto a simple DSLR these days.
It’s the Zacuto Gunstock Sniper Rig. I hired it from The Flash Centre (because it costs over £2.5K!) and I thought the wedding would be a cool opportunity to give the Zacuto toys a whirl. This particular model offers 5 points of contact against the user (on your shoulder, into your chest, on the grip, holding the focus puller & the eyecup to your face), all theoretically adding stability. Furthermore I strapped my monopod (& quick release ball head) to it, so I could drop down the leg for ground support too.
I found it awesome to use.
The highlights of the rig were the Zacuto Z-finder (this one was the Junior. model & was ace in use, but a pain to remove & drop back to shooting stills – the pro version is better for both) and the Zacuto follow focus, which allows you to turn a gear to manually focus the lens. In conjunction with the Z-finder magnifying the LCD on the back by 2.5x it’s really possible to focus on-the-fly. The hawk eyed may be able to spot that TFC’s Graham & I’d Blue-Peter DIY’d the follow focus a bit by using some rubber bands to connect my various lenses to the gears. They worked surprisingly well.
Here’s me in action, with a perhaps more shirt hanging out than is entirely proper. But it gives you an idea of how it sits in use & how I favour a ninja-type getup at weddings.
It really was cool to give wedding videography another stab, with a slightly more planned approach and with some fun toys at hand. I’d say I’m still not convinced wedding videography is right for me though. The workflow is totally different and the elements are so eternally harder to control. In videography, especially in the it-happens-once-&-quickly context of a wedding, if someone stands in front of you, or accidently bumps you while filming etc, that whole take is ruined. While shooting stills, I know I can take several shots and one will be usable & possible to really bring to life in post.
But it certainly was fun playing video guy for a day. So thank you so much to Carly & Joe for asking me along, and to Rob for his skills!
B
ps. My humblest apologies for the geek quotient of what could be just ‘here’s-a-lovely-wedding-video’ post! It’s not usually like this…
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