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I’ve been bleed­ing for a big project, some­thing to really throw myself into. Luckily, wed­dings are as big as they come, and at 70.43 GB of footage taken, this wed­ding was the biggest by far.

It was also the first Italian wed­ding I’ve expe­ri­enced, and there was noth­ing more inter­est­ing than observ­ing the cus­toms. It’s a very phys­i­cal cul­ture, with lots of hug­ging, kiss­ing, and firm pats on shoul­ders. And some­how every­one is a nat­ural dancer. How did every­one know to hold hands in equally sized cir­cles and start mov­ing in the same direc­tion? How did every­one know when to stop hold­ing hands and start clap­ping1? How did you every­one known to step in to touch the groom and mother at the same time?

This is a per­fect exam­ple of how video takes over the lim­i­ta­tions of still pho­tog­ra­phy. A lot of cama­raderie and inti­macy and con­fi­dence only come out when motion is involved, because it’s all in how peo­ple move and inter­act. Trying to cap­ture a bride eat­ing cake out of her cleav­age just isn’t pos­si­ble with a sin­gle frame.

This was a very spe­cial project for me, and I put so much love into this film, from the camera-work to the edit­ing to the grad­ing to the music. Over three hours of footage was care­fully stripped away to cre­ate this five minute story. Every moment mat­ters, every frame counts.

Sarah and Mike are so happy with the final prod­uct that they’ve now decided to send a DVD of this video out to all the guests in lieu of thank-you cards. For a wed­ding of 450 peo­ple, this is no small con­sid­er­a­tion. When I first met them, I knew they were going to be a fan­tas­tic cou­ple to work with because they were super nice and made me feel very com­fort­able. They also gave me full cre­ative con­trol, which is always the most impor­tant thing for me as an artist.

Production notes

I mostly used two lenses: the 24–70mm f/2.8 and 70–200mm f/2.8 IS mk II. I changed to a 15mm fish-eye for danc­ing at the end cause the lower focal length pro­vides a big­ger depth of field. This was cru­cial, as I had my mono­pod propped on my waist to get shots from a high angle, and I couldn’t see the viewfinder there so I was just hop­ing for the best. I’ve decided that I can never use primes cause things move way too quickly when it comes to video to be chang­ing lenses all the time.

There’s some­thing very vis­ceral and nos­tal­gic about the grain in the low-light shots that isn’t the same as grain added in post-production. I’m now tempted to shoot an entire wed­ding at 3200 ISO.

Everything was filmed in full man­ual this time. In my expe­ri­ence, the con­trast of the dark suits and white dresses really throws off the auto­matic cam­era set­tings. This means that on top of com­po­si­tion, focus, and move­ment, you have to worry about expo­sure, but it’s bet­ter when you’re shoot­ing against con­stantly chang­ing back­grounds and envi­ron­ments cause the cam­era won’t sud­denly make things too dark or light.

My invest­ment in the Glidetrack has already paid for itself. Side-pans make great tran­si­tion shots. Sure, you could try to fake side-panning in post-production, but the edges of fore­ground objects have cer­tain angles and tex­tures and bokeh that gives each shot a unique look.

  1. It reminded me of this time I saw an opera in Budapest. When the cur­tain came down and the audi­ence started applaud­ing, every­one even­tu­ally clapped in uni­son and didn’t speed up. North Americans all clap in an amor­phous din, but over in Hungary it’s like they were all clap­ping to the tim­ing of a con­duc­tor. [↑]