Why I Still Film Weddings
WHY I STILL SHOOT WEDDINGS — PART ONE
Other videographers ask me from time to time why I still want to film weddings.
Sometimes the question is more like, “Why would you want to get back into that?”
I understand why they ask.
Weddings are hard.
There are no second takes. There are no do-overs. If something happens and you miss it, it is gone.
Nobody is going to walk back down the aisle because your camera wasn’t ready. Dad isn’t going to give his daughter away again because you were changing a battery. The groom’s reaction happens once. The vows happen once. That hug from a grandparent happens once.
That pressure is always there.
And strangely enough, I love it.
I love knowing that whatever happens, I have to figure it out.
Wedding days almost never unfold exactly the way they were planned. Timelines move. People disappear when you need them. Somebody needs five more minutes. A ceremony starts early. Or late. The weather changes. The light changes. The reception room that looked beautiful to your eyes suddenly looks like a cave through a camera.
And in Texas, there is a pretty good chance it is hot as hell.
You are carrying equipment, moving tripods, setting cameras, checking audio, watching batteries and thinking about what is happening now while also trying to figure out what is about to happen next.
And through all of that, I am trying not to become part of the wedding myself.
I want to be invisible.
I know I’m not. It is pretty hard to be invisible with cameras, tripods, lights, stabilizers, audio equipment and everything else we drag around.
But I never want a couple’s wedding to feel like a video production.
“The wedding is more important than the film.”
I’m there to preserve what is happening, not take it over.
There is something about all of that pressure that makes me feel incredibly alive.
On a normal day my mind can be in twenty places at once. Emails. Bills. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Something somebody said three days ago. Some problem that hasn’t even happened yet.
A wedding shuts all of that off for me.
There is too much happening.
I have to be there.
Completely there.
I’m watching faces. Listening to voices. Looking for reactions. Anticipating where somebody is about to move. Thinking about light. Thinking about sound.
I might be watching the bride’s father while everybody else is watching the bride.
Sometimes I’m looking across the room because the moment I want isn’t happening where everybody else is looking.
For those hours, everyday life disappears.
The only thing that matters is what is happening right in front of me.
I think I’m addicted to that feeling.
I feed off the energy of the day.
I love the nerves before the ceremony. I love watching parents trying to hold themselves together. I love the laughter when something doesn’t go according to plan. I love watching a room full of people react to two people they care about.
There is an importance to weddings that I don’t feel in most of the other video work I do.
I enjoy corporate work. I enjoy commercial projects. I enjoy sitting down with someone and telling the story of their business.
But weddings are different.
The things I am recording can actually become more valuable with time.
Today it might just be Dad giving a toast.
Years from now, hearing Dad’s voice might mean something completely different.
The same is true of a grandparent laughing. A mom talking to her daughter. A friend telling a story. All these little things that don’t necessarily feel historic while they are happening.
Sometimes you don’t know what you are preserving until years later.
That responsibility has never really worn off for me.
If anything, the longer I do this, the more I understand it.
So when somebody asks me why I still want to film weddings despite the stress, the long days, the heat, the unpredictable schedules and everything that can go wrong, I guess there isn’t a short answer.
I love weddings.
I love the challenge.
I love the pressure.
I love the importance of it.
I love being around people on a day when they are allowing themselves to feel everything.
And maybe more than anything, I love what weddings do to me.
“They force me to be present.”
They exhaust me.
They frustrate me.
They challenge me.
But after doing this for more than two decades, I also understand something I probably didn’t fully understand when I started.
I’ve had couples tell me they saw things in their film they never knew happened on their wedding day. Moments across the room. Reactions they missed. People they didn’t get enough time with.
I’ve had people tell me they thought their wedding video might be something they watched once, only to realize later how much it meant to have it.
That changes the way I look at what I’m doing.
Because while I’m running around in the heat, moving cameras, worrying about audio and trying desperately not to be noticed, I’m preserving things that may actually become more important with time.
The faces.
The voices.
The people who were there.
The way it all felt.
Maybe that is the strange trade I make every time I film a wedding.
For one day, I give it everything I have.
It wears me completely out.
“And somehow, it fills me back up too.
That is why I’m still here.”
Why I Still Shoot Weddings
This is the first in a four-part series about what keeps pulling me back to wedding filmmaking after all these years.
