FAMILY MILESTONES & MEMORIES
THE IMMORTILISATION OF FOND MEMORIES
One of my favourite types of videos to make are documentaries of family milestones. I enjoy candidly capturing the people and moments that immortalise memories precious to the celebrant or client.
Sadly, some of my favourite samples I am unable to show for privacy reasons.
EVENTS
Whether for an event in your town or a family event, we’ve got you covered.
WEDDINGS
A short word on weddings.
Here’s the truth: Top wedding videographers charge a fortune. And if you can afford it, they’re worth it. I mean $20,000+. But worth it.
The next tier are Wedding Video Factories. Companies with ‘Gold, Silver and Platinum’ packages that hire out videographers to shoot the footage which then gets put through the wedding cookie cutter editing machine. They’re not much better than the next tier.
Then comes solo operators that might hire a friend to help. These are the ‘cheap rates’, and mostly they don’t really know what they’re doing. They copycat YouTube and come up with the weirdest stuff that’s supposed to be ‘trendy’. And they like to show off their ‘fancy camerawork’.
Then there are people like me who know what they’re doing and know what’s important and what’s not, but not really in the wedding market.
Of the hundreds of videos I’ve done without contract and on a hand-shake, the only time I didn’t get paid was for a wedding. But no hard feelings. In the pre-wedding footage it became evident that they had 7 kids between them and really couldn’t afford an extravegent wedding.
Then there was the time I was busy doing something else on the Belvior Castle Estate where I lived and was called up urgently to the castle. There was a huge wedding up there and the videographer didn’t show up. Could I do it please? So, without enough time to hire on a second cameraman, I did that solo with no notice for the pittance. the missing videographer was asking for. That’s the first video below.
The thing about weddings is that one necessarily shoots TONS of footage during the course of the day. It takes me a week to edit one of those. And I give them the ‘long version’ and a ‘highlights video’. Yet, with the ‘going rates’ I get less than half of what I would get for a corporate video that takes me 4 days to shoot, edit and turn over.
Anyway, as for me, when I’m shooting that ‘tons of footage’, it’s to capture precious moments that no one had any idea were being filmed. That’s what’s important. That’s what makes someone want to watch it over and over and over again. A videographer is not a glorified photographer shooting all the usual posed standard off-the-shelf boring wedding photos. A videographer is there to capture a story and capture moments that will be treasured forever.