Anatomy of a Wedding Film Sequence
Photo credit Alex Toze Wedding Photographer
WEDDING CINEMATOGRAPHY
THE ROWE FILMS APPROACH TO WEDDING VIDEOGRAPHY
I frequently receive messages from people wanting to find out more about how I go about wedding filmmaking. I really appreciate the interest some of you are showing, so thank you.
The questions, (apart from those about cameras and filmmaking equipment) mainly focus on my general approach to wedding filmmaking and how I actually go about crafting a film. Of course, there is a lot that goes into that.
So I thought it might be a nice idea to do a little blog post, touching on some of these subjects, to give those that might be interested an insight into what goes into the production of a wedding film. A bit of ‘behind the scenes’ info, if you like!
This is for anyone who might want to know more about wedding filmmaking, whether you are an aspiring wedding videographer yourself, or even a bride and groom interested to know what will go into the production of your wedding film. So if this sounds like your cuppa tea, then why not sit down and have a read. I hope you find it interesting!
HOW I APPROACH WEDDING FILMMAKING
In order to understand the context of the specific sequence I’m going to discuss, first I need to provide a bit of background info regarding my general approach. In a nutshell, it is both theoretical and technical.
Creating a real narrative is something I focus on with every single film that I produce. Whether that be wedding videography, Youtube content, a documentary, or commercial filmmaking. It forms the basis and foundation of my video production work.
Talking about wedding films specifically, I try to find the theme running through each wedding day and then use beautiful cinematography to present the story with as much atmosphere, mood and emotion as possible. A wedding film, to me, should be more than just the documentation of one day. It should be a story about two people falling in love and getting married. The wedding day is the event where it all takes place, but the story is about the couple. As amazing as wedding venues and dresses are, ultimately, it’s all about the people, and this is what underpins everything that I do.
That specific point is the one single thing I have been planning to expand greatly on in my future work. I’m always striving to improve what I do, and try new things. I have so many ideas, so many things I want to try, unfortunately set back somewhat by everything currently going on in the world. But when the world eventually returns to something resembling ‘normal’, I fully intend to get stuck right in and create magic in new ways, so watch this space!
The theoretical part of filmmaking is something I consider important, even in wedding videography. Any compelling story arc has a structure to it, and identifiable stages. Traditionally speaking you have the exposition, climax and denouement. There is also usually some form of tension and/or conflict in a story arc. Of course, this isn’t really the case in a wedding film. There’s not going to be any conflict to resolve (hopefully not anyway!), but that’s not to say you can’t still create a compelling story.
There are some common themes that I identify as running consistently through my wedding work. I would define them as based on some traditional storytelling stages, and they tend to be as follows;
Exposition - This is setting the scene, showing the viewer what they can expect. A powerful, emotive and often atmospheric intro sequence to build anticipation, is a method I often utilise in my work. I may tease footage of the couple together, but not show them in their full glory until later on in the film.
Climax - The exciting bit. The “You may kiss the bride” moment is usually (but not necessarily always) what I would consider the ‘climax’ of a wedding film.
Denouement - The final resolution of a story. Closure, if you like. I often use a standalone ending sequence to conclude the story and leave a lasting impression on the viewer. Usually comprising beautiful images with some profound dialogue about their future together. Focus the viewer’s attention to what might be in store for this couple in the years to come. A metaphoric (and often quite literal too) walk off into the sunset.
Putting this theory into practice, I’ve always believed that when it comes to editing a wedding film, this is really where the magic happens. You don’t have to show everything in chronological order, or the order in which events actually took place on the day. For example, when setting the scene in an intro sequence, or when showing the wedding preparations building up to the the actual wedding ceremony, I will often use parts of the speeches to give the viewer a bit of a backstory, despite the fact the speeches actually took place after the ceremony and later on in the day (chronologically speaking). This could be the father of the bride telling us childhood stories about the bride, or a best man describing the character of the groom. This helps to expand the story to be more than just the documentation of one day, provides some context, background, and lets the viewer really get to know the people involved.
I will also often utilise time jumps to help tell a story in a more intriguing way. If a viewer is expecting a certain event or sequence to come up next, there’s no reason you can’t subvert that expectation and jump to a different moment, provided it is in service of the overall piece, adds value to it, and doesn’t risk feeling out of place or jarring. It can’t be used as a mechanism to be clever, trendy, or to be ‘different’ just for the sake of being different. But it can certainly help to hold on to the viewer’s attention. It’s a fine line, and often one of the many challenging elements of crafting a compelling wedding film. You can push the boundaries of traditional ‘rules’ and established views about how wedding filmmaking should be done, but if you push it too far, it risk things becoming incoherent and nonsensical. Playing with time is a common theme in my wedding films and I don’t follow the same structure every single time. In fact, I don’t have a set ‘template’ or structure to fall back on. Instead, I prefer to approach each wedding film as a completely blank canvas. How can I make this one different to the last?
I am often told that my work can bring complete strangers to tears. People will message me or comment on my posts to tell me they cried, or got goosebumps, even though they have never even met the couple. Apart from being one of the greatest compliments anyone could possibly give me, this tells me that my general approach appears to work. In the same way that the director of a feature film understands the viewer has to care about a character before the story can progress, I try to produce my work so that any viewer of one of my wedding films can feel a connection with the couple.
Storytelling is something I am constantly studying and working on. I intend to go into this subject further in future blog posts, but for now, let’s just take a look at this particular sequence from Kerry & Oli’s film…
ANATOMY OF KERRY & OLI’S WEDDING FILM ENDING SEQUENCE
I used this sequence as the ‘denouement’ stage of Kerry & Oli’s stary. To finish off the 12 minutes of film that preceded it, and conclude the story. I wanted it to feel uplifting and draw the viewers attention towards Kerry & Oli’s future. After their ‘roots have grown together’, what will their future bring?
There were three main objectives that I wanted to achieve:
Create a fitting conclusion to the film
Create LOADS of atmosphere
End with a wow factor and leave a lasting impression
That’s the theory side of things anyway. But how did I go about that? That brings us on to the technical aspects of wedding videography.
FILMING THE FOOTAGE
When it comes to the couple portrait shoot on the day of the wedding, I always try to get a good variety of shots of the bride and groom interacting. The more variety the better. As a wedding videographer, it’s extremely important to leave a wedding with plenty of footage of the bride and groom together. It can become boring to the viewer if the same ‘scenes’ are overused and/or all the footage of them looks the same. Depending on the wedding, you might get good periods of time with the bride and groom, or time restraints may mean you only get a few minutes to get what you need. So it’s imperative that I make the most of each and every moment I get to film the couple together. This is where the relationship between the videographer and photographer comes in, as both need to get what they need and their requirements sometimes differ somewhat. The importance of working as a team on the day is paramount, but this is a subject for another blog post!
During a couple portrait shoot, I like to play around with the framing of each shot; from long shots incorporating the surroundings, to tight, intimate close ups. I love to get in close as it produces footage that feels very intimate. Here’s another good example from one of my recent wedding films. Check out the variety of shots and how they make you feel, from long sweeping shots and drone images, to extremely tight close ups:
I always try to make use of camera movement and focus, to reveal certain elements in a shot, to draw the viewer’s eye where you want them to look, and also to give everything a cinematic feel overall. I often like to ‘dirty the frame’, using out of focus objects in the foreground such as trees and structures, to give depth and context to a shot, as well as added visual interest. When it comes to the ‘rule of thirds’ and others like it, I’m always aware of them, but don’t always stick to them. Rules are made to be broken, right?
The most important consideration however, and the very nature of photography itself, is light. I’m absolutely sure anyone who uses a camera for a living would agree with me when I say, it’s all about the light. During a couple shoot, I’m constantly on the look out for interesting lighting. Light is genuinely the most incredible thing. It could be hazy sunshine falling beautifully on a countryside landscape, or one spot on the ground where light spills through a canopy of trees. A spotlight provided by nature. Golden hour, thanks to the refraction of sunlight through more of the atmosphere, creates the most incredible shooting conditions. Unfortunately though, we are always at the mercy of the weather gods, and they don’t always deliver. Conditions aren’t always ideal, far from it, so when you’re not provided with what you want, you have to adapt and get creative. Work with what you are given, as there will always be something you can do. Another subject for a future blog post perhaps!
During Kerry & Oli’s portrait shoot, myself and the photographer Tom wondered off with Kerry and Oli for 20 minutes or so, just after they had finished eating and just before the evening guests were due to arrive. Talk about a perfect ‘Golden Hour’! It’s always good to make efficient use of time on a wedding day and some of it can be played by ear. We went for a walk, had a chat, had a few laughs, and generally had some fun. I always try to make this part of the day as relaxed and fun as possible, because that approach tends to produce the best footage. Along the way we gave the bride and groom some very subtle direction (walk over there, stand in that light for a moment), but on the whole we basically documented them interacting together naturally. This is the way I like to operate during these shoots. During our little walk we found a beautiful weeping willow tree which provided us with loads of visual interest and amazing lighting, so we made good use of that.
POST PRODUCTION
After the shoot, it’s time for the edit. This is arguably the most important stage of the process and in my opinion where the magic really happens. When it comes to the editing, you are presented with many, many hours of footage from the day. Think of it like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Near the end of the process, you will have turned hours of random video files into something organised like this:
It can be quite daunting, not to mention time consuming, at the very start of the editing process as you have so much to sift through and there are quite literally a million and one ways to put it all together. There is no way around this. You have to watch back through everything that you shot on the day. If you don’t, you will miss out on those magical split second moments that naturally come in abundance on a wedding day. Sometimes, the most difficult bit is actually deciding how to structure the film. So many ideas, and so many ways you could tell this story, so which is the best way? Yet another subject for a future blog post!
For this particular sequence, I saved some of the most aesthetically pleasing footage to last. Throughout the rest of the film I had used loads of footage of the couple together and also teased some of these beautiful ‘golden hour’ shots earlier on in the film. But I saved these for the ending, because a decent golden hour really does produce some incredible imagery and I wanted the film to end with a real wow factor. But when it comes to filmmaking, visual images are truly only half of the story.
Sound, in my opinion, is equally as important. I have touched on music in previous posts, but music choice could not be more important. I am very particular about my choice of music and there’s a running joke in the industry that a wedding filmmaker’s post-production process is 10% editing, 90% listening to music to find the right stuff. This probably isn’t too far from the truth! But there’s a lot more to sound design than simply picking jolly music. In this sequence, I started with a very subtle piano track that had a lovely chord structure and emotive feel. I will often ‘audition’ pieces of music by listing to them in the background and just skimming through some of my shots, to get a feel for it. This usually involves skipping through dozens and dozens of tracks until you find that one piece that, for some kind of strange, indescribable, perhaps even spiritual reason, just clicks. A piece of music that when combined with your visual imagery, gives you the feels, but you simply cannot explain why.
The rest of the sound design I built up myself using Logic Pro X. I layered some synth sounds, a countryside soundscape, and I also heavily processed the dialogue. The speech you hear is the vicar during the ceremony. I used a heavy EQ, Reverb and a Tape Delay to give the dialogue a real presence, almost like it is being heard via a radio, or in a dream. All of this sound work complemented the video footage perfectly and provided buckets of atmosphere. Finally, I must admit to taking real inspiration from a hero of mine that is the world renowned film composer Hans Zimmer. I processed a synth riser in the correct key, for my title sequence, ending with a cinematic hit on the visual blackout. Boom. The End.
If you can, have a watch of the end of the movie ‘Dunkirk’, scored by Zimmer. In my opinion this is probably the greatest ending to any movie ever made. See if you can hear a similarity in the ‘riser’ ending. It’s worth pointing out that this is inspiration, not copying. Unfortunately I didn’t have a Spitfire to set fire to, but I do often find inspiration from the likes of Christopher Nolan, an absolute master of his craft, sneaking its way into my own work, often completely subconsciously. I usually don’t even realise until after the fact - “Oh yes, that must be what triggered that idea of mine!” Fancy getting a tiny bit of inspiration from a WW2 movie, to use in a wedding film!
All of the above pieced together gives this ending sequence an epic feel that even a couple of years later, I’m really pleased with. Us creatives are notorious for looking back on our previous work through more judgemental eyes! Watching the sequence back, even without the context of the previous 12 minutes of film, I believe it ties everything up nicely and even works well as a lovely standalone clip. During the edit, I actually sent it to Kerry & Oli as a teaser before delivering their completed film, and it definitely got them very excited.
So I ask myself objectively if I have achieved my three objectives for this piece, and I’m happy to say that I believe I have. To summarise, there is absolutely no right or wrong way to produce a wedding film. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand the nature of the art, in my opinion. It’s all entirely subjective. All wedding filmmakers have different styles, different looks, and different ways of going about it, each with equal merit. No style is lesser than any other.
“Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.”
- Whoopi Goldberg
Lots of people often tell me how much they love my style, which is an incredible compliment that gives me a proper buzz every time I hear it. It is truly humbling. But equally, it’s a matter of fact that others will not like my way of doing it. And that is absolutely OK. The way I see it, it’s amazing that people have so many different styles to choose from. After all, how boring would life be, if we all liked the same things?
I hope you’ve found this blog post interesting. If you’ve got this far, well done, and a huge thank you. If there’s any part of wedding filmmaking or video production in general that you would like me to touch on in future posts, please feel free to comment, as I’d love to share more. I’ve learnt so much from others over the years, and I genuinely enjoy passing that on to help others. Perhaps I’ll turn this ‘Anatomy of…’ blog into more of a ‘vlog’ series for Youtube at some point soon.
Thanks for reading, and until next time, take it easy!
Tommy
If you’re interested in hiring Rowe Films for your Wedding Videography please get in touch to discuss your plans. If you’re an aspiring Wedding Videographer yourself and wanting to learn more, then feel free to drop me a message about my mentoring and consultation services.