Shooting my first wedding next weekend

[Greg Fiske]

I wouldn't use the iphone. The recorder needs to have some kind of locking mechanism so that the person cannot change the settings by accident. And you need to be able to lock or use gaffer tape on the recorder to keep the mic in place. If you haven't already, watch all the stillmotion canon caravan training episodes:

an intro to shooting a ceremony with EOS // canon cinema caravan on Vimeo

[Evan Bourcier]

Hey guys! Just an update, I realized there's a wireless lav at my church we can use, so I'm gonna grab that tonight and test it out. The rehearsal is tomorrow, I'm gonna see if I can test it out on them there, to test the range and whatnot.

[Greg Fiske]

Thats great for an extra backup, but don't depend on other peoples equipment to do your job. I haven't been to a single wedding where the house system didn't crack at some point in the ceremony.

You should spend $200 on a local second shooter, who will most likely have the right equipment that you can use for the gig. I help out people locally and have no problem with them using my equipment. That way if you forget to press the record button on the recorder you have a backup.

[Evan Bourcier]

Hey, another quick update. I'm running off to the rehearsal in a few minutes, I'm gonna see if the groom minds throwing the mic on so I can test it out. I tried it at home today and it seemed to work great, but I want to test it in the real situation. Would it be possible to record the wireless mic into a channel on the zoom while using the mic built into the zoom to mic a speaker?

[Evan Bourcier]

Hey guys, this thread kinda died off, just thought I'd remind everyone today is the day! A little nervous, especially since it looks like rain and it's all outdoors... We'll see though. I'm sure I'll have a big rundown tonight or tomorrow for you guys :)

[Chris Harding]

Good Luck Evan

We are holding thums for you!! I'm sure it will go well!!

Chris

[Evan Bourcier]

Thanks Chris! I survived haha. It was a long day, 10.5 hours from the time I got there to the time I headed home, but I had tons of fun. Only some minor technical fumbles, but we sorted them all out relatively quickly. Came just short of filling all 4 16gig cards, and the 3 batteries worked fine the way we ended up shooting, we just had the extras on chargers as much as possible. I'm now pulling down all 64gigs of footage onto my poor Macbook Pro haha. I've never edited this much footage before.. Any tips on how you guys do it? Do you plural eyes the whole day or just individual sequences?

Thanks,
Evan

[Stephen Hill]

Personally I break it down into sections and then compile them into a final sequence. By then I know what I have inside out and am ready to cut highlights/trailers.

[Taky Cheung]

All the Asian weddings take all day. Easily 10 hours to 16 hours... and they are eventful. I have 20 16GB SD cards and always use about 12 to 18 per wedding. I should do more American weddings :)

[Evan Bourcier]

Hey guys! 15 hours of editing later I have the main version up! I'm going to add the speeches, first dances with parents, etc on the DVD as well, but they didn't really fit into this one. I'm also probably going to edit a quicker trailer version for my site.
I decided I need to buy better mics, and I need to rent the IS 70-200 next time. I'll post more thoughts later, gonna run to church now though :P

Feel free to be brutally honest!

Nathan And Alllison Wedding 2012 - YouTube

Thanks,
Evan

[Taky Cheung]

Great job! I'm sure the couple is thrilled to see the footage. Your company logo screen spin scene shows twice near the odd. That's a little bit odd.

[Noa Put]

I think for a first wedding you did well and you seem to have done a lot of effort using different techniques like slide and steadicam like shots.

I do think you have to look at your exposure, several shots are on the edge of overexposure and some are overexposed. I also didn't like that shaky, all over the place footage, combined with the steady slider shots it seemed out of its place. Also the steadicam moves where not very good, don't know what you used but it was distracting, some moves where ok but several not. The audio for the voices where ok, much better then what I got on my first wedding :) What I didn't like was that you included footage during the vows that was shot at another time because their mouths where not moving, it looks like you where with 2 shooters during the ceremony?
When everybody entered the venue you should have used a wideangle lens, shooting that with a (50?mm) lens that has a shallow dof is a risk for keeping your focus.

I really mean when I say you did very well for your first wedding but honestly I think you you tried too hard to do the same some experienced solo weddingshooters do. Creative eyecandy shots is something you only should include once you get the basics right. Hope you don't take my remarks too personal but since you ask comments from videographers you can expect that we would look at the details :)

[Evan Bourcier]

Hey Noa! Thanks for the thoughts, and don't worry, I'm pretty hard to offend :)
I actually agree with you too, most of your concerns are mine as well, though I will say when I showed the bride and groom the video yesterday they were supremely impressed and liked some of the stuff that bothered me haha.

A couple shots were intentionally closer to overexposed than underexposed, thought I do know what you mean. Some of the ceremony ones were because my assistant who was second shooting doesn't really know exposure that well yet hah, which is also where some of the shaky footage comes from. I don't totally blame him though, shooting with the non-IS 70-200 and having it be perfectly smooth is pretty tricky.

I was using a Flycam Nano for the steadicam, which is a very small cheap light steadicam hah. It was nice that it was compact and easy to get around in the tight places with, but it also started to unbalance itself a little right before the first look, and I didn't have time to really rebalance it after that so I was fighting it a lot to try and keep it where I wanted it. When it's balanced I'd say it's a good stabilizer, but it's a bit tricky to rebalance on the fly. The dancing stuff is somewhat intentionally all over the place, I like the energy it can add, but it also was partially because I also had to throw an LED video light on top of the flycam as well and it was too heavy so I was fighting it around again haha.

I had 2 shooters during the ceremony, me on the right side with the tamron 24-70 and my brother a bit further back on the left with the 70-200. As I mentioned earlier, he's a super unexperienced shooter, so it limited my options a lot for what to do with the ceremony. I tried shooting the walking down the aisle wider and it seemed to show just way too much of the fluff going on around them, which is why I pulled in a bit more. I was also having to shoot handheld at that point, as the 24-70 was too heavy for the flycam.

The footage was edited around the mouths moving because the vows got cut up. It was actually a repeat after me setup "Nathan, repeat after me: I Nathan - 'I Nathan', take you Allison - 'Take you Allison"... And they didn't want too much ceremony stuff in there, which is why I cut it down to just what they were actually saying, and I had to make a few wider cuts to cover that a little. That was another thing I felt kinda sketchy about but they really liked when they saw it haha.

Not trying to defend myself or disagree haha, just explaining some of what happened. Definitely learned a ton for my next wedding, and have already had a few people contact me about doing theirs after they saw this one, so I'm super excited. My to-do list now includes a nicer slider, something more like a glidecam 2000, having a better trained assistant whether that mean training him or using a different one, using better wireless mics...

Also: What are your guys thoughts on the length? I had a friend of mine who's a videographer say he thinks it's too long, but I've had a few other people say that they think it's a really good length, that it covers all the big stuff but isn't super long. I was planning on making a 2-4 minute "trailer" version as well, mainly for my site.

Thanks,
Evan

[Taky Cheung]

So the client will only receive this highlights style of the wedding and the trailer?

[Evan Bourcier]

They're receiving this, the trailer version, and a second DVD that'll have the speeches, the first dances (bride/groom, bridge/father, groom/mother..) and a longer form version of the ceremony. Their guests who want copies will get this and the short version.

We had talked beforehand about her not really wanting really long version. She wanted something relatively compact.