This afternoon was have a guest post from our friends at Border Row Productions (one of our Capitol Romance approved DC wedding vendors!) sharing some insight on how to plan for a wedding videographer and why you shouldn’t leave it until the last minute to hire one! They also offer up some great knowledge about the changing landscape of wedding videos – and how they aren’t just the 2-hour long, video on a tri-pod, recap of a wedding day! Take it away guys!
Wedding Advice: Wedding Videography Matters Too!
Imagine this…
The scenario: It’s a month out from your wedding. Your Facebook friend just shared the cutest video of her wedding day. You didn’t think you wanted a video, but after seeing how cool your friend’s video was, you’ve changed your mind.
The problem: You’ve already spent the majority of your budget or gone over budget. Since video wasn’t something you wanted from the beginning you paid top dollar making sure you had the best photographers you could get. Now, in your last minute search for video, you are shocked at the quotes you are receiving from the videographers you want to work with.
When working in the wedding industry, this is a scenario every videographer has experienced. To most couples, video is an afterthought, something they can just ask Uncle Bert to do with his camcorder from the 80s. Couples willingly seem to spend thousands of dollars on photography without blinking an eye, but then scoff at the idea of spending more than a couple hundred dollars on a video.
Wedding videos are changing. They are no longer hour-long play by plays of your entire wedding day. They are no longer something you will watch once, fast-forward through most of and then toss to the side never to be watched again. They are productions; they are short-films about who you are as a couple, how you came to fall in love, and how monumental this day is. You are going to want a video.
So, on behalf of wedding videographers everywhere, I am asking you to plan for it. A quality wedding video requires work. Here’s what goes into creating the type of wedding short-films that Border Row Productions delivers:
- Two pre-production meetings with our clients to go over the details of your wedding day, to learn about you as a couple, to know who needs screen time, etc.
- Two camera people on your wedding day for up to 10 hours of coverage from getting ready to the last dance at the reception. As well as, interviews with you, with your parents, and with your guests.
- Purchasing music licenses (about $100 per song… the good ones at least) to make sure you can share your video online with all of your friends without YouTube banning it or worse a record-label suing you or us. 30+ hours of editing your video, crafting your story, designing DVD labels and menus, and more.
Consider what ALL of that might cost and then what it’s worth to you!
We love our job. We love to tell stories, to capture memories, to touch people’s hearts, and to show the rest of the world that bitterness is foolish and true love exists. In my opinion, there isn’t a price tag you can put on that. But, we have to start somewhere. So if you are just starting to plan your wedding, repeat after me, “Videographers matter too”.
This isn’t the first time we have urged our readers to consider a wedding video! We wrote our own “Important of Wedding Videography” post a few weeks back and still stand by those sentiments! What do you think Romancers – did you realize ALL that goes into a wedding video?
