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The Hybrid Wedding and Wedding Film

The hybrid wedding, okay, combines still and motion. You're combining still and motion. You're gonna rely on audio from the day. And I'll talk about that in a second. It's gonna be about two minutes in length, maybe shorter. I'm gonna give you a snippet of a hybrid wedding, a very, very short snippet. And it can be done by one person; I've done it by myself. But if you have a second person, second set of hands, second safety net, that is really, really good too. You're gonna rely heavily on your still work to drive this though. Your still work will drive this. The video and the audio will support it. Still consider it like a moving slide show. I'm talking 80/20 here. That's 80% percent still, 20% video, maybe less. But what's gonna drive it is the sound that you capture during the day. So your how-to. You capture sound during the reception and the ceremony. That's the only time you capture sound. And we're gonna talk about capturing sound later today. But you're gonna give the DJ typic...

ally an audio recorder. And when you start doing sound you're gonna have all the requisite cables. You're give him the cable and the audio recorder. You're gonna pre-level it out and you're gonna hit record and you're gonna walk away from it and you're gonna check your levels on it and you're gonna walk away and don't touch it for the rest of the night. Set it for the ceremony, stop. You set it for the reception, leave it for the entire night. And then as you're recording motion, just know that you're recording sound. And then what you're gonna do is in post you can actually take that audio clip, drop it into a program called PluralEyes. And if you've captured video at all during the time where that audio's been recorded, it will automatically sync up. So that's really important for the speeches. Because the speeches will drive your film. Your speeches in the reception will drive everything on this hybrid wedding film. Now when you think about it as photographer when I was photographing weddings the two most boring times of the day were the ceremony and the reception. Because the ceremony, how many pictures can you take of the ceremony? And the reception, at about like 9:30 or 10:00 o'clock you don't wanna take anymore pictures because they're all inebriated. So that's a great time in your brain to switch from still mode to motion mode. Because what are the two times you need to get the ceremony? You need to get them maybe walking down the aisle then getting the kiss, a couple times where they're talking giving speeches, just so you have it, grandparents in the front. There are just some shots that you get out of the can. Flip to video, you can capture some of the vows, capture some of the other things. Stop, switch back. Hey, you've got the audio from the entire day in the ceremony. You've got the audio from the reception. So even if you only capture snippets and clips here and there you've got them for reserve later. So now let's watch something. May this be the start of a whole new exciting journey with just enough twists and turns to make the ride exciting, never boring, and to always deliver you exactly where you need to be, with each other. Very short, but can you see how it would expand? I wanted to make sure I gave you a very short segment so you can understand how the rest of the film would drive with the speeches. So let's dissect what we just watched. Almost all still. The stills were doing the Ken Burns thing. I drove it with a little bit of soundtrack and all the speeches. So it's maid of honor talking about how they're gonna be together the rest of their lives. There's a little bit of a soundtrack tooling underneath. There's the pictures from the day. And then, oh my gosh, she pops up on screen and she's actually talking, oh my gosh. And then it cuts back to more stills. Think about it in chunks. You've already done all the still work. Already done all the still work. I bet you if you shoot weddings you guys can do all that still work in your sleep. The other things you gotta do is carry a recorder, record speeches, which if you can level a recorder you can record speeches because you're just gonna pull the feed from the DJ. The other thing is all you gotta do is throw in the speeches stick it on a monopode and hold still for that speech. Because I guarantee you, the one thing that every couple wants that they never get are the speeches. Because they'll get a still of the person giving the speech and then they'll forget about what that person said. So if you have the ability to capture the sound from the reception during the speeches and then have the forethought to frame them up and capture them speaking, you've got gold there. You have gold, you've just gotta mine it. Your hybrid wedding film for photography is probably the easiest type of film to make because it relies so heavily on the still work that you've already done. How are we doing? Questions? Maybe you'll get to this later, but what if there's no DJ? Okay, if there's not DJ, do they have a PA system? Are they talking through a microphone? Is it just kind of like an open, like a hipster wedding? Sometimes. If it's an open hipster wedding, I'll talk about this later. I'll talk about this later, but I have what I call poor man lob setups. Poor man lob setups will cost you anywhere between 120 bucks and 150 bucks. They're not wireless, but what you do is invest a few hundred dollars in a poor man lobs and you mike up anyone who's important and just let it run for the whole day. And then we'll talk about it later then. So I really wanna stress, guys, we're talking about opportunities here for photographers. And I want you to be honest with me. Has anything that we talked about seemed undoable? No, it hasn't, has it? It's actually really simple, especially given the fact that we spent a lot of the time yesterday talking about the fundamental building blocks to getting us to the point where recording the motion of an individual looks easy. And it's great because yesterday if I would've shown you this stuff you'd have been like, "I can't do that. "I don't know how to do that." And then we've gone through all that stuff yesterday and now you go, "Okay, that's doable. "I know what he was doing there." When you can look at someone's work and you can look at someone's film and stop yourself and pick out what they've done and how they've done it, that means you're starting to think like a filmmaker. You're starting to think outside the box a little bit. So the next opportunity we got is called the wedding film. Now this is 100%, 100% motion. You don't put a still into it unless there's some reason you absolutely have to. There's no stills usually. Sound is a dedicated job. You're not recording it just during the reception or the ceremony, it's all day. Typically, you're gonna dedicate an entire person recording sound all day. It's a two-person, sometimes a three-person job. It will require multiple cameras. It is a production. So if you're gonna do a wedding real and you're gonna do it absolutely, think how many people and how much time you're gonna invest in photographing a wedding for still. Usually it's two people; usually it's for an entire day. And you're in the zone all day capturing stills. If you're gonna do motion and capture a wedding for motion and do it for real, like, do it for real it's a lot more work. Capturing sound, you gotta have a plan going in. You gotta have the right equipment. We're talking about hybrid stuff is down here. The minute you step up into a wedding it becomes a huge production. Here's the wedding how-to. You're gonna need more camera. You need more than one camera. You're going to need more than one camera. You can't do it with one. I've seen it done with one and it just doesn't feel right. Because you need multiple angles of live events. Live events require multiple camera. And I'm gonna set the bar there for you. There are people who can do it with one camera but I'm gonna set the bar there for you. You're gonna be required to capture sound all day and you're gonna need a flushed out plan of attack. Where are your movements gonna be? What's gonna be more important to capture? So we're gonna watch part of this wedding film from my friends over at Shade Tree. And you're gonna see here the difference in a wedding film or like a fully produced film versus something else. (soft music) Tiffany, I remember the day we met like it was yesterday. That night you went obviously out of your way to punch me in the arm and I knew at that point that you were totally into me. (laughing) From that day on we were always together, just like we wanted to be. (soft music) I can remember all the times that we would talk about our future, talk about where we'd like to live and what that would feel like. And here we are, five years later, making our dreams come true. (soft music) (upbeat music) [Man In White Shirt] We'll put that by that fire pit. Where are the wine barrels gonna end up being then? The wine barrels will be there. Okay, so they'll be, like right where that ladder's at? Yeah, pretty much. It doesn't have to be tight, tight. No, he kinda wanted it level with the ground. Get that lined up. Keith's standard's are high, whether he's spending a couple of extra hours editing a wedding or choosing a woman to spend the rest of his life with, he has set his standard high. His mind is constantly working on ways to improve, whether it's his business or his personal life. His pursuit of excellence is always there. (upbeat music) On the corner, this one right here needs a wedding sign with an arrow. When I first met Tiffany about five years ago we were working together. She would show up with an average size purse with and entire refrigerator inside of her purse. (laughing) I'm so happy to see that not only her belly was full but that her heart was getting full too. So, that was just a really snippet of a wedding film. And you can see how much production goes into it. They got ready, they did all this stuff, they did all that work and didn't even get to the wedding. They had the vows to start, it was very the vows to start, and ten the whole process kind of unfolded. They had the speeches fill in. They had all this other B-roll material. That's a huge production. But it's so fruitful, isn't it? So fruitful. If you guys can go from not knowing how to do video to doing hybrid stuff and to step into doing weddings like the way these guys do weddings, you should be teaching this class and not me. That's kind of like a really, really cool thing. And I love the way that they put together weddings.