Most videographers and photo-graphers have a clause in their contracts regarding what is expected at the wedding reception with regard to dinner. Videographers usually work eight to ten hours on the day of a wedding in an environment where they are physically and mentally active. He will want to grab his dinner in the opening minutes when dinner is first served since this is usually the one time during the reception when nothing is happening. It will be an advantage if you can make arrangements such that your videographer eats either in the same room as the guests or within visual range of reception activities. In this way he can keep an eagle eye open and be ready to jump into action to capture memories at a moment’s notice.
If it will help, we at W. Cardone Productions will have your videographer wear a tuxedo at no additional charge.
There are important distinctions that exist between house audio or public address and cinematic.
House audio must be optimized for understandability in a room that has dynamic auditory characteristics. Sometimes people are coughing, children may be excited, someone may be sitting next to sound absorbing curtains while another may be sitting against a bare wall reflecting sounds, and the list goes on. To optimize understandability a public address system will therefore have a narrow band of frequencies it will put on the loudspeakers usually centered around 3,000Hz, optimum for the human voice. Cinematic audio, or audio for television, serves an audience of just a few people in a relatively small room. Under these conditions the audio is much easier to understand. This leaves room for a much wider band of frequencies enabling a more natural and rich sound.
Capturing audio from a variety of church sound systems we have noticed the practical effect of all this. The sound we typically capture from a house sound board sounds fine in a video until you compare it with audio we captured at the same event with our own microphone systems.
Please view below a sample video illustrating the differences between a typical house audio system and audio for cinema. In the video you will see a pastor delivering a wedding message to a couple during their wedding ceremony. The pastor is double miked wearing both a house microphone and one of our wireless microphones.
The video is in HD high definition so if your bandwidth is too slow click on the HD icon to switch to standard definition. Please bear in mind that this is raw video and not necessarily representative of the quality we release.
It is extremely rare that a wedding or event can transpire from beginning to end without somebody making a mistake somewhere. What is worse is when something unfortunate happens during a significant event that you had wanted to cherish for a lifetime. Your videographer can only capture what transpires and cannot turn the clock back to have your wedding party perform their part again without the mistake. After all, your videographer is only human. …or is he? Maybe he has abilities far beyond those of mortal man, is able to jump across tall buildings with a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet, etc.
Technology allows us to do amazing things in the edit room that just might persuade you that your videographer has abilities far beyond those of mortal man. In the example to follow we captured the lighting of a unity candle by mothers of the bride and groom. The mothers made a mistake. They were not supposed to actually light the unity candle. Their task was to light two individual candles which the bride and groom would later use during the wedding ceremony to light the unity candle. For the plain and simple video of the ceremony we will just show what happened at the wedding. However, when we develop the music highlights video, artistically composed from events of the entire day, we want to avoid triggering unfavorable memories and center on developing those which warm the heart and will continue to warm the heart ten or more years down the road.
So, what are we supposed to do? We could simply leave out the mothers lighting the candles which would be ashamed as this is symbolic of families joining. What we did was not change the story but simply remove a part of the image which would draw attention and the viewer’s eyes to a mistake. Viewers will still know what happened but at least the showing of the candle lighting in the music highlights video will not be highlighting a mistake.
Please watch the twenty-seven second video below where you will see the actual footage of the candle lighting and then you will see how a portion of that same footage was used in the music highlights video.
One very powerful set of memories lost with time from your wedding are those pertaining to the day itself.
Things that went wrong that day.
What surprising things happened that day.
What looked like it was going wrong but worked out in the end.
What was the groom thinking as he saw his bride in her wedding dress for the first time.
What was the bride thinking as she walked down the isle with her father.
At W. Cardone Productions we have developed an incredibly powerful technique to preserve these and other memories from a wedding day.
One or two weeks after the wedding we have the couple come to our studio to answer a series of prepared questions pertaining to their wedding day. We record their responses complete with all the laughter as they explain what happened that day. We then place the audio of these responses in appropriate places of their wedding DVD as a “director’s cut” option that the viewer can interactively select from the DVD’s menu. By default those responses will not be heard. When enabled, however, the responses will be heard as the original video lowers slightly.
Please ask to see a sample of how this works. Only then can you fully appreciate how powerful a memory preservation technique this is.
While we won’t have time to attend a rehearsal dinner, we think it is imperative that we attend the wedding rehearsal itself if we are providing a comprehensive capture of memories in motion. Unlike photography, videography deals with circumstances and conditions where pre-planning spells the difference between a huge success and good or only marginal results.
At the rehearsal we communicate to site staff and the wedding party where our cameras will be, who will get wireless mikes, where audio will be captured, what precise movement to expect from us during the ceremony, and other important information. In the process we learn what limitations exist in terms of the people and facilities involved.
The most important result from our planning at your rehearsal is that we can operate transparently on your wedding day. You will have confidence that we have your day under control allowing you freedom to enjoy your day for what it is—your cherished wedding day.