Cinematic Wedding Video

Your wedding is going to be one of the biggest days of your life… and people want to look at their best… you’ll have the best hair, dress and makeup, and you will want a good photographer or video to capture this moment. So you look online and you see someone advertising a cinematic wedding video for £299.

If you break that down, once they have paid their income tax and petrol to get to you, you are getting someone film your wedding for around £200… and you may think thats a good days work.

I was finalist and runner up in the Filmconvert short film competition… Its a world wide competition judged by some leading Hollywood cinematographers…. one of whom is Shane Hulburt, whos recent work includes Terminator Salvation Need for Speed and Fathers and Daughers.

Terminator Salvation had a budget of $200 million for a 120 minute film…. now I know you haven’t got the costs of actors and props, so say we halve it.. it is still just below a million dollars per minute. Why does this cost so much more?

Look at all the people listed in the credits of a Hollywood movie… there are hundreds of jobs… some of the main ones being, editor, colourist, DP, sound guys, your going to want GOOD licensed music…

The answer to me is that for £299 most of these jobs cannot be done… for me it will take around a month of post production to create your wedding video…. you can spend 2 days alone cleaning and preparing the audio… de noising, de clicking and removing hum, then adding eq and normilisation..so your speeches sound good.

The hours of raw footage and audio will all be watched a few times, the best bits taken, the colour matched and graded… All the exposures, white and black points and colour balance matched between shots, then colour added, not just adding on an instagram type lut.

The editing and post production really is a process of refinement and application… which again is the REAL cost.

And then on the day the filming, you are going to want someone who is very competent at operating their equipment and understands as well as a good photographer how to capture you looking at your best… the lighting and composition, but that is a topic for a another time.