Ever wonder what the "raw" footage looks and sounds like in a wedding film ?
Most people are fairly familiar with what Wedding Photography is all about, and often know what to look for in their photographer. At the same time, Wedding Video or Cinematography is still a bit of a black art. A big part of great wedding cinematography is crafting a cohesive story to go along with beautiful images of your wedding day. Anyone can go through the raw footage, cut in the "pretty" pictures, throw a sappy piece of music on it, post it to the web as a trailer, and call it a day. Our process is a bit more complicated. The first thing we do when we get back to the office, is review the raw footage, and start to put together "sequences" or "scenes". The footage above is an example of a sequence of shots that will most likely end up in the final film, in a more edited form. On the day, we may film each set-up multiple times....pan right...pan left....tilt up....tilt down.....camera moving.....camera steady....etc, as many ways as we can get the images in the allotted time. We then take the similar shots and put them together as kind of a virtual notebook. What we are looking for are what shots we really like, and what ones can be edited, or "cut", next to each other, to properly tell a story. (More importunely, we find the audio we need to drive the story, but thats a post for another day). The above footage would internally be known as something like "Kissing in the Orchards", anything that helps us identify short sections of the final film. We will generally put an opening shot, like the pan of the park, to set the location for the viewer, known as an "establishing" shot in the film world. We then end it with a nice shot of the couple walking out, kissing, etc. Then, fill in the blanks. While the final film or trailer will certainly not have 7 or 8 similar shots of the couple kissing in the Orchard trees, like the footage above, we do edit them together, and watch it over...and over....and over, to see what shots we really like, and what works together. We then end up with multiple scenes, that we can then put into the right order for the final film.
