I was always that guy who caught things on video. I didn’t really even realise it, but whether it’s something appropriate for You’ve Been Framed or a quick holiday recap video, I’d started to quite enjoy making videos.
I only used my phone and a GoPro and some basic editing software really, but in the last 3 years or so I made some semi-nice looking videos of things like cycling holidays like this one in Girona or this one from the day I ran, cycled and Kayaked the width of Scotland in a day. Production values low, but some nice memories preserved nonetheless.
Last May, just before my own wedding I came up with the idea of handing my GoPro around some of the wedding party across the day and seeing if they could capture some of the wedding, with very low expectations. We didn’t hire a videographer, at the time it felt like an unnecessary expense, and we already had an awesome photographer on board, would we really need video too?
That turned out to be one of the best decisions we made. Waking up the next day and flicking through some of the content on the GoPro app was brilliant. The parade from church to reception, the brass band playing in the garden, the smiles, the food, the music and the dancing. It was all there. It might be wide angle, weird colours, horrible sound and terrible low-light footage but it was all documented and exists for eternity now. I cobbled it together into a video which we love watching, and I doubt anyone else does, but that’s not really the point.
Following this, some other friends asked for something similar at their wedding in Tuscany. A bit more time on the editing software, the use of a newly acquired Drone and the end product was a bit more polished. Still with awful sound and grim low-light footage, but an improvement.
I then upgraded to a proper bit of kit for the job, a Panasonic Lumix mirrorless camera with 5 way image stabilisation and a Rode Video Mic which I took round Argentina for 3 weeks. Footage quality, significantly higher, and I turned this into a series of vlogs around the places we visited which all live on here.
A lot more learning and practice followed, before my first “proper” wedding video at Hannah & Nick’s incredible wedding in Norfolk in April. If you ever get the chance to video or photograph a wedding, do it. It might be quite hard work and pretty full-on, but it’s a load of fun, and weddings are one of the few times where you are just surrounded by happy, positive people all day long having the time of their lives. It is awesome. My full write up on Hannah & Nick’s wedding is available in a separate blog post.
And that is how I got into making videos. Let’s see where this ends up.