There’s a key difference between Wedding Video and Wedding Film. One you should have, and the other you’ll love having! There’s a key difference and it’s not what you expect it will be!
Join us as we talk all things Wedding Film with Adam from Oxen Media. If you’re thinking about having your Wedding filmed, grab some paper and a pen because you’re about to discover exactly what to look out for when you’re looking for the ideal Wedding Filming Company for your Wedding.
And yes, it totally helps when your chosen Supplier is SUCH a nice guy with a big heart and bags of enthusiasm.
2 Wedding Film Makers go “reel to reel” to chat about what inspirations make great Wedding Films and how the world of cinema and music inspires and influences every scene.
and why you need the right person for the right job, Celebrant Led Wedding Ceremonies and Choice!
So in nearly every family, there’s always someone who’s “a bit of a character”.
Now depending on what type of character they are, you can either choose to lose it, or use it… 🙂
In our case, it was very much “use it”!
But before I dig in, I just want to rewind a little, or is it fast forward? Maybe a bit of both!
Now Celebrant Led Wedding Ceremonies are not a massive thing here in England.
We’ve certainly filmed some in the past… and some amazing one’s at that. But Celebrant Led Wedding Ceremonies are not as common as you’d expect.
A Civil Ceremony or a religious Ceremony. These are the 2 options for most couples. Job done!
Well, one of our friends gave us the shock of our lives the other day!
This particular shock was relating to the choices available for their Civil Ceremony…
Or the lack of!
Quite the box ticking affair I’m afraid to say….
“Hi Sarah, which of these 5 approved readings would you like…”
Now I don’t know how clued up about your actual choices you are, but suffice it to say that the above isn’t your ONLY choice… not by a long shot!
As you know, in Scotland, A Humanist Ceremony is legal. Ultimately, that’s what we chose!
We enjoyed complete free reign over what was included and what was not. A Humanist Ceremony is, after all, a Celebrant Led Wedding Ceremony!
That doesn’t help folks wanting to get married in England, Wales or Ireland. But there’s a work around and it’s an amazing one!!!
If you elect to get officially married in a registry office, perhaps with only close family members in tow…
you’ve sealed the deal in the eyes of the law, happy days!
You can then opt to have Celebrant Led Wedding Ceremonies at a place and time of your choosing.
What’s more, this Ceremony becomes YOUR Ceremony and you can do and say as you please.
Your options with this are nearly limitless!
As a result, you can plan the Ceremony of your dreams and have it in a way that means so much more to you both.
Get married in a barn, in a forest, in a castle, on a moat, boat or surrounded by goats…
That pretty much sums up our collected experience 🙂
Neato!
So back to our Wedding to exercise the point I’m making…
We chose this reading from an old book entitled “Yorkshire Songs” as we wanted to take some of our beloved Yorkshire up to Scotland with us.
My brother Matt, was the obvious choice for this reading as we knew he’d embrace the opportunity whole heartedly.
Now being an old Yorkshire song, it was, of course, written in old Yorkshire!
So… well… see for yourself…
Now this meant the WORLD to us, not only for the performance and the recording which we’ll enjoy for the rest of our lives, but also for the meaning attached to it.
SO personal and so meaningful.
Isn’t that what a Wedding SHOULD be?
That’s EXACTLY what Celebrant Led Wedding Ceremonies are!
So as one of the “Weducated” we really do implore you to explore your options and get as much good advice and as many ideas as you can handle.
Once upon a time, I penned the lyrics “Memories are the architects of feeling” and nothing has even been truer of the memories we created on our Wedding Day…
and the feelings they create every time we relive it.
Convention or typical choices need not rule you here!
Why not liberate yourself to make your own decisions and love the outcomes you design.
Gosh! Is there a single Bride or Groom to be who hasn’t thought “will my Suppliers turn up”…
This is a fairly extreme example but you know, will my Wedding Suppliers turn up on my Wedding Day? Are they going to remember? Are they going to let me down? That kind of stuff!
When we spoke with Wedding Espresso couples recently it was a topic that just kept coming up again and again.
And rightly so!
There’s a lot on the line here. Both financially and emotionally.
So you’ve done the right thing – bought some Wedding Insurance… but even that’s not giving you 100% confidence… how do you shake that nagging feeling of “will my Suppliers turn up” from creeping up on you?
You’ve already got enough to be worrying about.
Am I right!?!
So I’d like to share a little story with you from my own experience of this very situation.
But not from the perspective of a Groom, but actually from the perspective of a Supplier!
Unless you ARE or have been a Wedding Supplier, you’ve not spent time in their shoes.
Any Wedding Supplier worth their salt holds your Wedding in the highest of high priorities. Trust me!
The question of will my Suppliers turn up on my Wedding Day really isn’t that big of an issue.
I mean, sure, you hear the horror stories and these get blown out of proportion, but for the most part, good Wedding Suppliers are in abundance and you’ll know deep down when you’re talking to one.
It certainly put my mind to rest when I came to understand just how far we Wedding Suppliers were willing to go to fulfil our promise and commitment to you, our cherished Brides and Grooms.
Faced with this scenario myself, it became clear to me that if I booked the “right” Suppliers for our Wedding, we’d get that exact same undying devotion.
Will my Suppliers turn up for my Wedding Day simply became, we can’t wait to see our Suppliers on our Wedding Day.
That’s a weight off!
Weddings! They’re a big deal!
We REALLY rolled the dice when we booked a Photographer from California!
That’s how much we trusted in our Suppliers 🙂
Will my Suppliers turn up on the Wedding Day? We flew one across the globe!
I digress, let’s get back to the story I wanted to share with you.
It all began with a modest sized Volcanic eruption in Iceland…
Do you remember that enormous Volcanic Ash Cloud that disrupted air travel across Europe for weeks in 2010?
Teamed up with my Photographer brother Simon, we packed our gear bags and headed out for a Post Wedding Shoot with our Client… in Venice.
Lovely!
Now will my Suppliers turn up for our Post Wedding Shoot? Surely that question came up in our Client’s minds once or twice… no one’s bulletproof!
The plan was to meet them at the Station where they would be pulling in on the Orient Express.
Fantastic!
Well I’m happy to say that worked a treat. The Orient Express people were superb and even gave us exclusive use of a carriage…
Not sure quite how we wrangled that one, but there you go!
Now Simon and I were quite used to modest accommodation on these types of jaunts, we had no wi-fi, no TV and 3 days to scout locations, shoot the material and hop on back on over to the UK.
Now celebrating it’s 10th Birthday, here’s the film we made…
Shot on big cameras, big tripods and big glide tracks by the way… not the dainty and far more practical small digital SLRs and Mirrorless Cameras everyone uses now 🙂
But that’s not the end of this story, not by a long shot!
Satisfied with everything having worked like clockwork, Simon and I headed back to the Airport via water taxi, luggage and footage in tow.
We arrived to what can only be described as mild pandemonium!
People scuttling about everywhere, looking lost, looking panicked.
We were shattered and ready for home!
There were an unusual number of flight cancellations on the boards.
Our flight appeared…
CANCELLED!
How? Why? WHAT?!!!!
So we went to the airline help desk to find out what was going on.
Haven’t you heard?
Well no, we hadn’t. We’d been in a communications whiteout, with no news reaching us at all.
Flights are getting cancelled across Europe due to a Volcanic Ash Cloud.
Well, that’s new!
How bad is this?
Well, there are no flights leaving Venice for the next few days!
OK, so first thoughts are, a few more nights in Venice could be great, right?
Wrong! We had Weddings to Film and Photograph that weekend and we had 3 days to get back to the UK!
That nagging question “will my Suppliers turn up” had now done a full 360, we HAD to get back to the UK for Weddings that weekend!
CAN we, as Suppliers, turn up when the whole of Europe is grinding to a halt?
So we pressed!
NO flights?
Well there’s one flight leaving for Paris in an hour, presently, it has spare seats and hasn’t been cancelled.
We booked on it!
Paris, that’s a whole lot nearer the UK than Venice!
The take off was an interesting one…
We can’t say with 100% certainty what communication took place between the pilot and air traffic control, but suffice it to say that we hit the runway whilst luggage was being stowed in the overhead lockers!
We also took off at a fair whip… the pilot wanted to get home too!
Will my Suppliers turn up? Yes, as long as the plane lands.
Relief washed over us as we landed in Paris.
But then we had to find a hotel with Wi-Fi so that we could try to arrange our next mode of transport.
Our options were now limited. Ha! That’s an understatement.
Hertz had 1 car left in France, it was something like 3000 Euro’s a day!
So that was a no go.
We then took alternative shifts, searching the interwebs and sleeping, trying to find some form of transport that could get us over to the UK.
Time and time again, our available options would mean getting home too late to get to our Wedding bookings!
We struck gold however, and secured 2 seats on a packed out ferry!
Setting off again after just 2 hours of on and off sleep, we arrived at the ferry port by bus.
Landing in Portsmouth in the wee small hours, we met up with Rachel, who had a gruelling 6 hour drive down in the dark to meet us.
We then shared (actually Rachel did most of it) the drive back up whilst Simon and I literally conked out.
Holy smokes though, we made it back up to Yorkshire with enough time to charge batteries, load up on fresh media and back out the door to shoot our Weddings that weekend.
Now that’s a fair indication of the level of commitment good Suppliers are willing to go to in order NOT to let you down.
Will my Suppliers turn up, you’d better believe they’ll move heaven and earth to do it!!!
I’ll add to the story that one other Supplier didn’t make it and elected to stay in Venice, defeated…
Well all I can say to that is that they were clearly not a “good” Supplier.
When you first meet up with a Supplier, your gut will tell you all you need to know!
Well that’s a happy ending to our little story and a fantastic memory.
Rachel and I later went to visit Eyjafjallajökull, the source of all that ruckus…
But more on that next time 🙂
I’ll leave you with a thought to calm your nerves about whether your Suppliers are going to turn up.
Book good, get good! Relax!
We’ll use Planes, Trains, Automobiles, heck Donkeys and Llamas if needs be! We’ll be there for you!
We’re MASSIVE globe trotting nature lovers and we (the humans) often lose sight of what’s MOST important in our world. Things DO happen beyond our control, insurance companies call them acts of God. The value of having a good contingency plan for any eventuality can never be understated!
We’ll always do our best, and on very rare occasions, that may HAVE to fall short. Just keep a backup in mind so you don’t have to get stressed if we’re facing a zombie apocalypse!
Best Wedding Speech of all time…this must make a top something list at least!
Firstly, we’ve seen some absolute crackers throughout our career – poems to make you laugh, poems to make you cry, full on audio visual presentations, epics, one liners and just about everything in-between… many could well be considered one of the Best Wedding Speeches of all time!
But there’s an art to a short Wedding Speech and a weight to it that can’t be conveyed by adding more words or talking for longer.
Then there’s my Wedding Speech, which, correctly, was quite long as I had a ton of folks to thank and I wanted to cover some serious ground and get everyone in… I come from a large family, I have 4 brothers AND a sister! Rachel’s family is Irish, so there are a few new extended family members to go at there too!
But this “Best Wedding Speech” from my centenary old Grandpa was to our minds, absolute perfection.
You’ve got to give the right people the right opportunities I suppose and this was a happy accident.
The decision to have Grandpa (ex Naval Captain, Headmaster and Principal Lecturer) speak at our Wedding was actually based on our combined amazement that he could be there!!! And not only walking but dancing!
What happened ultimately is that Grandpa had something to say that would perhaps seem awkward in any other circumstance.
We simply allowed the Best Wedding Speech ever, to happen naturally.
And this is true of so many people on your Wedding Day. Let them have a go at it if you feel they may have something to give…
More on that in a future post 🙂
Now something else you may or may not be considering… which I’m about to introduce into your Wedding brain…
This is video right!?!
Now what would be the result of NOT having our Wedding Day filmed?
Well… loss? Faded memory? An inability to recall the minutia of the moment?
No reliving the Best Wedding Speech of all time?
Yes, to all the above.
Do we have the stills? Yes absolutely.
Are they the same?
Whilst we treasure them dearly and the memories they evoke… no, they’re not the same at all.
A photograph will capture a moment in time, a singular expression, emotion or highlight. But the Best Wedding Speech of all time (TM) can ONLY be relived on film.
Would we trade one for the other?
Not a chance! 🙂
So you can see how this works.
If you’ve been on the fence about whether to have your day filmed and photographed I don’t think anyone could present more compelling evidence for you!
Also, whilst we’re on the subject, why not say hello to Wesley, our Wedding Filming friend. Not only are his films absolutely sublime, but he believes in ALL the same emotion, legacy and perfectionism as we do. Meet him here 🙂
