Embarrassing Mistake
 

So I just finished my second wedding (freebie) and proudly delivered it to the bride yesterday. She emailed today to say she loved it except for one thing... I spelled her new last name incorrectly through the whole thing. Not a big deal to fix but man do I feel stupid. Anyone else done this?

Yep - done that.

Bride was called and spelt Anderson - which is the usual way of spelling it but for some reason I kept thinking AndersEn. Mrs B even crossed it out on my notes and spelt it correctly but I still went for the wrong spelling.

All I can think is than my previous bride was called Hansen and it was the "sen" that kept throwing me.

Either that or I'm just a numpty.

Ian

Closest I did was spell the location wrong - Salmlesbury instead of Samlesbury an "L" of a mistake....


Ian

Raul,

Don't worry about it. We all make mistakes.

The main thing is that it's fixable. If it's any consolation, this sort of thing happens a lot!

It's not embarrassing at all. And it will probably happen to you again if you continue to do weddings. Just fix it and move on.

You'll get a lot of conflicting opinions on whether or not this is a good idea, but we always give an approval copy for the couple to see before we make the final copies. This gives them a chance to find any mistakes or technical glitches. You just need to be very, very, very clear up front that you are not doing this to give them the opportunity to hand you a five page list of desired changes...

Put it in your contract. I generally state that I will fix mistakes for free, and work one hour on minor changes, then charge after that.

I figure that with all the weddings I have edited, the extra time taken doing minor changes has pretty much evened out with the time saved not redoing final copies to fix a glitch or whatever. It's often not your fault. A glitch introduced in the mpeg encoding or DVD burning for example. And the client is very happy that you will work with them to change a couple of things.

There was a discussion on this not too long ago if you want to do a search...

Last week i was reviewing a a DVD I had finished authoring and noticed I named it "Tort Immuntities and Defenses" Ooops. Glad the they never saw that one. In fact, I hope they don't read this post.

I actually spelled Lynda wrong in the credits of the short I produced for my tutorials on Lynda.com

I spelled it Linda and didn't see it until it was too late.

minimizing mistakes
 

I minimize this mistake by having the couple email me the names. I then highlight, copy and paste, so there is no human error on my part. Any errors in spelling is left to them.

If I have to type them, I reserve 15-min of full concentration no disturbance on this part of typing. In this way, I don't make mistakes.

In 2 years, I still have to make a mistake where it reached the client. It is often caught on the preview stage, so it never gets out. And that is usually because I had to type it myself.

-Mel

I'm also really carefull when it comes to spelling errors, my father once made a video for about 30 different persons and all their names were listed in the video but he wrote one name wrong, eventhough the 30 copies were ment to go to 30 different people they all demanded to have a new copy when they heared there was a spellingmistake.
I work like Mell asking the people to send me the details through mail and then just copy/paste and if they don't have mail I use their invitationcard and triple check before doing the final dvd.
Dates are sometimes very tricky, I used to write the month down in numbers but after writing month "06" instead of month "07" I started to write out the months name in full.
Even if you are really carefull mistakes can happen, a few months ago I made a wedding video and had playback problems on the customers dvd player, I was really annoyed about that because the dvd played fine at my place. to be sure I used another dvd authoring program and redid the dvd menu. I delivered the product and the dvd played fine. 2 days later the client calls me to tell I forgot to place their names and their weddingdate in the dvd menu :D
Most important lesson I learned from that was to allways take your time during editing, even if you are on a deadline.

Ah that must be Samlesbury Hall. I almost got married there. Fabulous place.

Ian

Anyone ever goof and get the wedding date wrong in the DVD menu etc? I can only imagine if the poor groom misses an anniversary because he can't remember the date, and uses the DVD for reference... not that that's ever happened...

Never screwed up the B&G's names but I have mispelled names in the credits. It hurts when you've burned and printed a couple of dozen DVD's only to discover the mistake later.

I did that with one of the first weddings I did for some acquaintances of mine. They never signed a contract so I didn't have the name written by them. Since then, I always be sure to check the contract for correct spelling.

I just finished a project and spelled both the MOB's and MOG's names wrong. At least it didn't look like I was playing favorites.

Best you can do is fix it and move on. That and maybe throw in an extra DVD or two.

Great advice getting names emailed.