I will start like many others have buy saying it was fun, I learned so much, made plenty of mistakes, and I really want to peruse this career so you will probably be annoyed with my extensive list of questions on future post
:
So I will start with the setup and the equipment:
The bride was a friend of mine since middle school and she was just planning on not having any photography or videography and I told her that I would do it at cost for me.. essentially free. Then my wife gave the same offer to do photography (she is a talented but not pro photographer). I lost my best cameraman
, but had a photographer that I knew I could work with
.
I had 3 camera:
1 pro-sumer mini dv : cannon xl2
1 mini dv: cannon optura 40
1 hi 8: sony DCR-TRV140
This was a small wedding in the living room of the couple. There were 20 guest and 25 people total including the officiant, my wife and I and the couple.
my first trouble was getting proper white balance on the xl2. (the "handy cams" were left to auto or indoors because there were no white balance features) The whole wedding was in front of a window with white shades. The couple was standing directly under an incandescent light, and there was a fan with 4 incandescent lights hanging in the middle of the room with 8ft ceilings. so it was a struggle to get my back camera (optura) to not have a light spike down the middle.
there was a curtain on the right side of the room to shut off the living room from the kitchen so I was able to put my tripod behind the curtain and have the camera peak out (sony). I had the xl2 shoulder mounted, and the bride and groom were fine with me being aggressive in trying to get the shots I wanted.
We showed up the day before and had an interview with the couple in their home. And my wife and I actually helped them move out furniture and set up the living room. (I'm hoping that will not become a tradition in my videography career)
Even though we spent the day with the bride and groom, I will say that we started our day at 3:00pm with the wedding at 5:00pm. We were able to get some good shots of the bride getting ready and the hop over and shot the groom getting ready.
at around 4:50 I started recording on all of the cameras and had a kid go to the front and count down for me with his fingers.. this was so when editing I can line up the timing better.. if i had all xl2s I could do this automatically. There probably is a better way to line the clips up.. but at the time of this writing I do not know of any. but I digress. From that point on I left all of the cameras recording.
There was not really any processions. The groom came in with the officiant and then the bride cam down to a very condensed version of fur elise. I got her with the xl2 as she came down the stairs and as she went to her dad, I then quickly went to the place she was going to be standing and filmed her coming down the isle. I was depending on the Sony for the time that I was moving out of the brides way, but the M.O.G. decided that it was better to stand 4 feet in front of her chair in order to be in the way of that camera. So I will have to do something ...creative there.
The officiant forgot to tell people to be seated so my Sony was rendered useless except for it mic for the first 3 minutes of a 10 minute wedding. I was to the left with my xl2 getting some artistic shots at least until the father gave the bride away.
I then went down to the middle isle out of the way of my cannon in the back and tried to get of the officiant talking, I was very careful to stay out of the way of the Sony. I went back to the front and got the groom giving his vows from behind and the to the right of the bride and then the same for the bride and then went back to the middle for the rest of the ceremony.
At the end the bride and groom left to the last 30secs of "its a beautiful day" by U2 which will be the song for their "highlights video". The photographer (my wife) wanted to have more pictures of the bride and groom kissing with the officiant and putting on the rings so this gave me an opportunity to get some good close up of these shots.
There was a small small reception with no dancing so I walked around with my xl2 and interviewed people. The bride and groom did go outside to a swing for a photo shoot so I got some video of them swinging and walking around their yard.
My biggest issue was lighting. I do not know if it would be possible to overcome this with the small space we had.
Also I should have known the camera better. I use a xl1 and a gl2 often but the xl2 is different enough to get me off track.
my hope is to never again use consumer handheld camcorders. I hope to buy 2 cannon gl2 or possible the XH G1, and then rent a xl2 or XH A1 (if i go HD) if the client will pay for 3 cameras.
I am an open source junkie so for editing I am using a very powerful open source VE software called cinelerra. I have used final cut pro before and yes it is better and easier, but cinelerra is really good and I support open source if at all possible.
well I have to do some of my "real" work so i may not have my highlights video up for a while but I will post a link to it here.
I will also have a website up once I get that highlight video ready and design my site.
