Gaining experience and learning with an open mind

My first wedding I filmed was for another company in 2010, I kept on filming weddings for that company for the next few years and learning a lot, and making a few mistakes along the way, fortunately I was always shooting with other more experienced people who covered when I didn’t quite get the shot. I’ve never forgotten how quickly I learned during those first few years. I kept an open mind with everyone I filmed with, noticing what worked well and what not so much.

Whilst heading up Confetti & Silk I also now shoot for around 5 different London wedding videographers each year. Shooting for other companies is common practice within the industry- people are only human and get ill, have personal emergencies and such like. Through the network of wedding professionals we maintain we usually have our ear to the ground to step in and help out our competitors, although we don’t see them as anything like competitors. There are so many benefits of us shooting for ourselves as well as other companies. We can always learn from our peers- most of our ‘second shooting’ is during the week and builds relationships with other wedding vendors that we wouldn’t otherwise come into contact with.

Being able to simply hand over our captured footage at the end of the day helps us generate revenue without building our wedding film backlog-which would have an impact on our own bride and grooms film delivery timescales.

One type of wedding we often get asked about is Asian wedding films,  we filmed our first Sikh wedding under the Confetti & Silk banner and hope to shoot more of them in 2017.  I’ve shot a whole bunch of other religion ceremonies for other companies so  I do know what they entail. My record is a 2,000 guest wedding day- not for the faint heart or inexperienced I tell you. Our second Asian film is currently booked in for February 2017 with Anika and Anish in London- we recently filmed their Save the Date invitation at the Shangri La Hotel in the Shard which you can watch on our portfolio page. Hopefully this will be our route into the Asian market as I love all the colours, the vibrancy of the days and the detailing that goes into the ceremonies and additional events. It’s really going to let us create something magical for our Asian couples.

As you can tell from our highlight films on the site we really try to push the cinematic side of our films with the subtle camera movements and positioning of the camera and how it shows the subject in the frame- we shoot a lot of ‘Hero’ shots of our grooms as it’s a very manly cinematic angle, from the waist height looking up at our groom filling the screen looking strong and powerful. During the ceremony we film at the same height as our couples eye line so it shows them looking ready and able to handle what is happening to them during the shots- i.e. they are about to make the decision to say ‘I do’ and marry each other! This past week I shot with another company who used a lot of long lenses and were static ontop of tripods, at first I thought it a bit odd but went along with it anyway, then I started to appreciate what shooting that way can bring and we’re now going to incorporate the odd shot like that into our own films. Watch this space.

If you can find a wedding videographer with lots of experience shooting in different situations, with different colleagues on the day, shooting in different styles then I think you’re onto a safe bet, I’d like to hope we’re now qualified to be that safe bet.

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