Video is key!
This may seem like a strange place to start for a blog on wedding advice: what about the planner, the venue and the other things that should come first!!? The thing is, a lot of you are getting married in the next few months so I felt it was important to get this off my chest early on: I don’t want you to miss out on this invaluable advice!
“But my budget won’t allow it and I AM having photos”
With all of the other “necessary” items on your checklist, a wedding video often gets disregarded or, at best, seen as a luxury that you just can’t afford. Let’s face it, you NEED photos, a car, a venue, a dress and so on, but a video can seem like just another expense. Photos are important – they really are – but they become one dimensional after so many views: they are just a flat, snapshot of a second in time. They don’t show body language, emotions or the atmosphere of your day. Let’s face it, you’ve spent enough money on it – why only enjoy it once?!
“Why do you think it’s so important?”
One thing I should clear up before I go any further is that I’m not promoting any video companies here! (In fact, I couldn’t even push the fantastic company that I used myself as they are based in London!) This advice is totally unbiased and coming straight from my heart: I attend so many weddings every year (have you SEEN Adam’s calendar!) and I really hate to see such special moments go by that aren’t captured for the couple to see again and again. The first dance, the speeches, the little looks that they give one another, the mother of the bride cuddling the groom, the little bridesmaid wandering around the gardens...these are all things that will have faded from memory within months without a video.
From my experience, I have watched my DVD hundreds of times (and I usually detest seeing myself on screen) and all of my friends and family have laughed and cried at it too. The Mum’s have even got copies to show off to their friends! In contrast, my Mum called the other day to say that she had found my wedding photo album in a box in her spare room. It had been there since the month we got married and none of us had noted its absence! That’s how unimportant that had become after the initial ‘wow’ of receiving it!
“Don’t friends and family always fear having to watch a wedding video?!”
It doesn’t have to be a boring 3 hour video of your entire day anymore: they can even put the best bits of the whole day in a montage to your first dance song so that your distant friends and relatives only have to sit through 4 minutes! Hardcore viewers can then opt to watch the whole thing as and when they want to!
When my Mum got her short cine film of her own wedding transferred to DVD a few years ago it was so emotional to watch: I had seen her wedding photos a million times and love them very much but it just seemed like a man and woman that I didn’t know in them. Watching her video, seeing that their mannerisms are the same now, seeing my Grandma as a young mother of the groom, seeing the way they looked at one another was just so surreal. I realised that I wanted my children to see my Dad look at me the way my Granddad looked at my Mum as he walked her down the aisle: that’s something that a photo would never give them.