What Film School Never Prepared Me For
For those who don't know me, I'm Jon, and I run Side of the World Wedding Videography. I currently work in live music on tour, and I make wedding films when I'm back home in Dorset.
I studied film at A level and at university. That's right, I'm old. Those courses taught me a lot: the language of film, the use of angles, pacing, and how all of it works together to build tension or atmosphere within a scene.
Years of that training serve a strange purpose. They drum the language of film into you so thoroughly that you stop noticing it. We all understand this language, even if we've never studied it. When we feel tension watching a horror film or a thriller, that tension has been built deliberately, shot by shot. We don't sit there consciously clocking that the cuts are speeding up, or that the villain's lit from a low angle, or the hero's lit from all sides. We just feel it. We respond to it.
Bring that training into a wedding, a real run and gun situation with no retakes, and it gets interesting.
At a wedding, you have to hit your marks. Nobody's going to be pleased with a beautifully framed, perfectly lit shot of the bride's mum's best friend if you've missed the first kiss. That's where craft and reality sit in conflict. Sometimes you just have to get the shot. It might not be perfect, but it needs to be there. It's crucial. Without it, it isn't a good wedding film.
What you can do is edit so that shot becomes a crucial part of the story anyway, even if it isn't lit from all sides, even if the background isn't dreamy. It's real life. We can't change that, and we don't want to. That's the crux of filmmaking with no chance of a retake.
My style is to stay unobtrusive. In my opinion, the real director of the day is your photographer, far more than me. They help you feel comfortable, feel posed, feel relaxed, and for many photographers that's a vital, expert part of their trade. But that isn't what I'm there for.
I'm there to document your day. So in places, you might see me filming your photographer taking your photograph. It's a behind the scenes element, folded into a beautiful looking piece that tells the story of your day. And that story is the most important part.
I'm not going to stop people and ask them to do something again because it looked cool. If I missed it, I missed it, and I'm sorry, but it'll be because I was doing something else. Perhaps I was filming someone else. Perhaps I was capturing a part of the day you didn't see yourself: your guests mingling, your in laws chatting, friends of yours meeting for the first time because your wedding finally brought them together.
That footage can be worth its weight in gold. It expands your wedding day beyond what you experienced yourself. And yes, the big moments will still be there too, all the whirlwind parts of the day you'll get to properly look back on, in the best way possible. Watch it on your phone with friends who couldn't be there, or sit down together on your anniversary or Valentine's Day. However and wherever you choose to watch it, it'll be waiting for you.