The Video Kings team is more than happy to be able to present this guide on how to make your Vancouver Wedding Videography request perfect. Make no mistake – people at all stages of the wedding planning process are stressed, anxious about hiring service providers, and in a rush to just ‘get it over and done with’.
To help, we’ll give you a step-by-step roadmap so that you can take care of your wedding videography request quickly and efficiently and get back to what really matters: spending time with the love of your life.
The Vancouver Wedding Videography Basics
Before we get into what makes a good video, it’s important to understand why you’re doing all of this in the first place. So let’s dive into it.
Depending on your specific cultural makeup, your wedding can take anywhere from one to five days on average. And that can seem like a lot (especially during the planning process), but when you consider the length of a wedding in the broader context of your and your partner’s entire lives together, it’s but a short blink.
Your wedding will be hands-down one of the best days of your life. It certainly won’t be flawless – there are almost always a few last second changes, stresses on the day-of, and a number of random factors that can detract from the perfection you’ve sought to achieve.
But, importantly, it will be your day; an experience that you’ve personally created for tens or potentially hundreds of people. Had you and your lover not gotten engaged, this never would have happened, and the power of your creative execution can not be understated. And considering the emotional impact this is going to have on you, your family, and your loved ones, there’s no doubt that you want to preserve as many of these memories as possible.
That’s what photography and videography allows you to do. The ability to take an emotion, a moment, or a fleeting second, and transform it into forever.
Unfortunately, during your wedding, you’re probably not going to have the time to do it yourself. What with you getting married to the love of your life and all. And that’s why you look for professionals like us who have years of experience doing just that.
Anyways – without further ado, let’s talk about how to maximize the quality of your Vancouver Wedding Videography.
The Top Three Things That Make Great Wedding Videography & Photography
If you’ve talked to our Vancouver Wedding Videography team for more than a few minutes, we’ve probably mentioned ‘capturing organic moments in time’. And they really are organic; we do things in the same way that a butterfly catcher might catch butterflies. We try our best not to interject or ‘change’ a moment, but rather capture it as it really was, and then accentuate the best features of that emotion to preserve it in posterity for the rest of your life.
But if you’ve ever tried taking a flawless picture while 130 people are eating cake and celebrating, you’d know it’s not exactly a walk in the park. There are dozens of angles to consider, a whole host of lighting choices, a variety of distances, and more – and you have to pick the best combination of those in just a few moments.
So how do we do so? It’s simple. We focus on three important areas:
- Lighting,
- Environment, and
- Candid Emotions
All photos or videos need, at minimum, two of the above factors in order to be considered ‘good’. For example, good lighting and a great environment will make a fantastic photo or video. Amazing, candid emotions combined with a great backdrop or contextual environment also make a great photo or video. But without more than one, you’ll never make anything more than a mediocre-looking slideshow.
And while it’s certainly possible to have a great photo with just two of the above features, the ideal goal for our Vancouver Wedding Videography team is to consistently maximize all three areas. We want your images and videos to have a great lighting combination, an amazing backdrop, and to be filled to the brim with emotions you’ll remember forever. We want to spontaneously capture the wedding’s essence in an instant
How VideoKings Perform Exceptional Vancouver Wedding Videography
Generally, our Vancouver Wedding Videography can be broken into two broad types: “Still Photo Montages” and “Cinematic Narratives”. The former type of video simply takes a series of high quality photos shot at 4K+, edits them into a slideshow, and then sets them to music. This is the type of video that your old highschool friend with a copy of Windows Movie Maker would make. It usually involves a lot of specific tastes, transitions, and music choices.
Unfortunately, this type of video tends to only be good as a memory for the people who were there. This is because when you take a bunch of photos and music and string them together, you rarely (unless done by an expert) get anything more than a sequence of stills. And while they certainly can have emotional appeal to the people that were present at that point in time, they’re usually unsatisfying and not ideal for really remembering the moment.
The second option, the Cinematic Narrative, involves purposeful professional cinematography used to capture weddings as they actually happen. We shoot in 4K+ at frame rates similar to how the human eye would capture an experience specifically in order to capture the emotional essence of a moment.
After years of working in the Vancouver Wedding Videography industry, the VideoKings team knows exactly what to do to make stunning Vancouver cinematic narratives that can still be enjoyed by the guests who missed the wedding, friends overseas, or your children’s children for a lifetime. We make sure everything is in focus, properly framed, and has dynamic motion.
Our Vancouver Video Production Company‘s colour grading and lighting choices are made to flatter every skin-tone or fabric choice you made, even months before your wedding day. And our videos don’t just document your wedding day – they craft a beautiful, inspiring story of how you met, the emotions of your first dance as a married couple, and even the silly inside jokes that you had all along the way.
Whether or not you work with us, it’s important you have as much information as possible on how to hire a good Vancouver wedding videography company. For that reason, here are some tips.
How to Hire a Stunning Wedding Videography Company
1) Get a Good Cinematographer
The best wedding videos have something that even the best photo montages can’t achieve: Dynamic motion and good camera work. The most important factor in having a cinematically stunning wedding video is to hire a good cinematographer.
This is why we always recommend hiring a cinematography or film director rather than a simple videographer for your wedding day. A simple videographers generally has a narrower skill set, while a cinematographer or film director can do both. In fact, most of the cinametographers and film directors we know started out as simple videographers, and developed an interest in storytelling through video.
2) Get Someone With the Right Gear
If you’re going to trust your wedding day memories to a video rather than a photo album, then you want everything to be perfect. This means hiring a videography company with the right type of gear that can adapt to any situation.
What do we mean by right type of gear? Really, everything from: having a steady gimbal to smooth out your walking and dancing shots; the right lenses to capture the details of your dress and venue; a good pair of ears for hearing that perfect audio capture of the toasting uncle; and much, much more.
Yes, we know that you’re going to want great facial expressions when you see yourself on the big screen for the first time, but great non-verbal communication is just as important. Your wedding film should tell a story with or without audio.
We also know that you might not have unlimited time to scour the internet for the best deal on a good quality video camera yourself. This is why we always recommend hiring a professional with their own high quality equipment rather than buying your own gear and having someone else learn on your dime. There are just so many different types of lights, cameras, rigs, and lenses that having a professional handle it all is always the better way to go.
3) Get Someone Who Understands the Golden Hour
The Golden Hour is a photography term used by photographers and our Vancouver Wedding Videography team to describe the hour just after sunrise and the hour just before sunset. During this time, the sun is low on the horizon which casts a sleek, beautiful path of light over everything. From a filmmaking standpoint, the Golden Hour is the perfect time to capture cinematic shots of your wedding as the light tends to naturally visually attract the eye towards it.
The first photos in this article that you see above were taken during “Golden Hour”, and despite being on a misty dock surrounded by forest, all attention is immediately drawn towards the bride. The second set of photos were intentionally desaturated, but despite this, everything still feels visually balanced because of the angle of the sun and the soft illumination of both bride and groom.
This effect can also be used to highlight certain colours in a photo. The bright reds, oranges, and yellows of our photos and videos are all naturally emphasized during the Golden Hour despite being photographed before noon.
4) Composition
The first thing you might notice about our Vancouver Wedding Videography and photography is that they’re not all straight-on headshots. In fact, most often, a side profile tends to feel more natural when capturing a wedding day as it adds variety to your photos. While the bride’s expressions are important, you want to have full coverage of details in her clothing, along with environmental details in the background.
From there, the composition of your photo can range from very simple to extremely meticulous, but we’ll talk more about that in an extended Vancouver Wedding Videography Composition Guide that we’re working on as we speak.
5) Interactivity
If you’re looking for a film that you can interact with, rather than just watch as a bystander, then ensure that whoever you go with knows how to make a wedding video interactive.
It is essential for a high quality, long-lifespan video to be interactive.
We don’t mean that you can press a button and make something change. We mean that, instead of boring, one-dimensional shots that show things from the same angle over and over again, you need a wedding video that adds dynamism, energy, emotion, and power into every shot.
The purpose of a wedding video is to reminisce and feel a portion of the emotions you felt on that special day. And the emotional part of your brain is directly tied to your memories – the more activated you are emotionally, the more you’ll be able to mentally put yourself at that same time and place and feel what you felt then. Now, we’re not neurobiologists, but do have a strong understanding of what it takes to maximize that effect with our clients and our videos, and we guarantee you it’s the single most important part of your wedding video.
By having all of these highly emotional moments broken up into small, bite-sized chunks, the interactivity of a wedding video allows everyone to enjoy it in their own way and get put back in their younger selves shoes if just for a moment.
Hiring VideoKings as your Vancouver Wedding Videography Company
So. With all of that said and done, if you’re looking for a high quality cinematic narrative wedding video rather than a slideshow, then we should talk.
Whether we chat over the phone or online, we want you to be prepared with some basic questions when we finally do get together to talk through your wedding video project. Naturally, our team members will ask you about all the technical things such as time and place, but we also want to know the “softer” aspects of your big day.
What was it like walking down the aisle to your soon-to-be husband? How did you feel seeing everyone in attendance watching you? What color was the envelope you opened in front of everyone just to double-check that your groom hadn’t gone missing?
All of these small moments are important to you, so we make it a priority to learn them all. One of our favorite things about this career is getting to know all of the little details. It helps us immerse ourselves into your wedding day so that when the video is finally released, we can feel like we’re experiencing it all again for the first time.
Get Your Vancouver Video Production Quote Instantly! Feel free to call us at (604) 723-1522, or visit our website at videokings.ca and we’ll help you maximize the value of your special day.
