We want your wedding to look as beautiful on video as it does in person. Sometimes, however, the wedding party's expectations of how a wedding will look on film are impossible to fulfill due to basic misconceptions about what a camera- professional or consumer, still or video- and a videographer can adequately capture due to lighting and spatial arrangements.
Lighting
When you're watching that oh-so-romantic scene in your favorite romantic comedy where Mr. Wonderful woos Miss Perfect by candlelight, it's not just the candles that are lighting the scene. What you don't see is the $50,000 worth of lighting equipment that is creating fill lighting and accent lighting to make the actors look good and the scene as romantic as possible. You're probably also missing the post-production work of an editor that adjusted the scene's lighting to make it as believable as possible.
Weddings, unfortunately, aren't like the controlled environments of movie sets where everything is adjusted for the sake of the camera. Videographers and photographers alike are often saddled with candlelight or "romantic, low-light" weddings. And while photographers have the luxury of a flash, videographers are left out in the cold when dealing with inadequate lighting. (Subsequently, the use of the photographer's flash seems to have been granted forgiveness by wedding parties, whereas the videographer's camera light has not!)
Our point is this: You must provide adequate lighting if you want your wedding video to meet your expectations. While there are certain techniques that a videographer can use to film a low-light wedding and that an editor can use in post-production to add light to the footage, neither can provide a finished product better than one that was filmed in a nice, well-lit area. Anyhow, you've spent a fortune to look beautiful on your special day. Why hide it with inadequate lighting?
Spatial Arrangements
At one point during the making of the film Citizen Kane, Orson Welles brought in a jackhammer and dug a six-foot deep hole in the studio's concrete floor to get the camera low enough for the one shot he wanted.
Unfortunately for us videographers, churches and event halls get really, really angry when we do that sort of thing.
When shooting a wedding, videographers are often seen running around to get the best angles possible. Sometimes, though, we run into two problems: architecture and the bride's wishes.
Often the architecture of a church or hall doesn't lend well to the angles we'd like to capture. If there is inadequate space to move at least 180 degrees around the wedding party, the videographer is limited as to the shots he can get. Ideally, he could move in an unobstructed circle around the bride and groom and get up-close, intimate footage during the most important moments of the ceremony, as well as wider shots of the entire wedding party. Cluttered churches, enormous floral arrangements, and a variety of architectural details, furnishings, and decorative items are often the biggest culprit in making a videographer's job more difficult, and the bridal party's expectations of what the finished video will look like may not match the reality of the limited filming spaces and angles given to the videographer.
Another problem in this category that some videographers face is that some brides want them to remain completely out of sight. (We already try our best to be as unobtrusive as possible!) To be honest, it can be done, but your wedding video will suffer immensely for it. Getting up close video of your vows, the kiss, and other extremely important moments during your wedding is best achieved by a cameraman to capture those moments, and if you can't see the cameraman, he certainly can't see you! And while stationary cameras may somewhat solve the problem, they cannot begin to accomplish what a real camera operator can when it comes to your special moments.
Inked Monkey Productions can not guarantee the quality of low-light and candlelight weddings. We also can not guarantee the quality of wedding videos where our videographers are provided inadequate space to film or are expected to remain out of sight.
We do not want to discourage you from making your special day your very own, nor do we want to discourage you from choosing us as your videographer. Our only goal is to give you a beautiful, heartfelt recording of your wedding that you will watch for years to come, and we want it to as technically superb as possible. By ensuring that we have what we need to film your wedding, we can ensure what you expect from the finished product: A wedding video that looks professional and is beautiful.
Sincerely,
Tim Brown
Owner, Videographer, and Editor
Inked Monkey Productions
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$2,000.00 
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