After 10 years as a full-time mum and with my 3 little boys finally all in school I managed to get some time to start focusing on my own interests! And as 2020 arrived I was all set to start filming as a wedding videographer. I had a handful of weddings booked – and by the summer I would have a good portfolio of amazing wedding films to show.
And then the Corona virus hit.
I feel so sorry for the brides and grooms who had planned so much for their big days, but obviously all of them have had to postpone their weddings. I know it has been a complex time too for the venues and other suppliers – and hopefully everything will be back to normal – and safe – soon.
I suspect that it means I won’t be able to get my wedding videography portfolio together until 2021 now – hopefully! But I am enjoying filming the kids in lockdown instead. And I bought a drone – this will allow me to get those beautiful scene-setting films of wedding venues – and for now the kids enjoy running around a field being filmed/chased by it. And one of my favourite things about my drone I have decided is that it has a button called RTH (“Return to Home”). I can press it and the drone flies itself back to the point it took off from. Phew!
So until #lockdown is safely over we are quarantining ourselves and I am enjoying spending time planning my ideas about wedding days and how I can create amazing films – to document the day – and that capture the people and fun and happiness. I’m enjoying learning more about editing (colour correction, LUTs etc.) now that I have some enforced time at home to study more. One theory is that there are 3 halves (?!) to a film – the filming, the sound recording, and the edit.
Wedding Filming: I film with a Sony A7Sii (with a Canon EOS650D as my back up). I’m looking forward to getting a new camera too to replace my Canon. There’s a rumour that Sony are releasing a new model this month so I have postponed buying an A9/A7iii until the new camera specs are announced and the reviews are in.
Wedding Sound: a nice idea I hadn’t seen used before for sound recording at a wedding is to attach a voice recorder on to the actual microphone used for the speeches. I think I’ll do this in future as a back-up where I can.
The Edit: so much can be done in an edit to change the dynamic and feel and look of a film. If you enjoy trivia I found it amazing to read that the average shot length (ASL) – the average length of a scene before a cut – in the Bourne Supremacy film was 2.4 seconds. It gives the film such a sense of fast-paced action – and means the film is made up of several thousand scenes. The edit alone must have taken a year?!
As a wedding videographer I doubt I’ll ever make a wedding film with an ASL of 2.4 seconds. Unless, of course, the bride requests it 🙂