My Journey to Wedding Videography!

The first thing I can remember about where my journey into videography began, would be sitting on youtube watching travel/holiday videos. Seeing such beautiful locations from around the world and how much fun people were having, all edited to catchy tunes planted a seed in my mind (excuse the Biology pun! I am a Biology teacher after all!!) that made me want to make a travel video myself.

It was 2016, and at 27 years of age I had my first trip abroad planned - off to Santorini to see my older brother get married! He pointed out a very cheap "gopro" type camera that recorded in 1080p, and I thought for £50 it's not a huge waste of money if it turns out to be rubbish. So I took the plunge and ordered my first "camera" with the intent on having a go at making my own travel video! Admittedly, I didn't have a clue what I was doing at this point in regards to photography or videography, and while the majority of the trip was focussed on enjoying myself, I did put together a holiday video, and it has still survived on my youtube page to this date (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjzrzSi_bwg).

Upon returning from having an absolute blast abroad for the first time, I was set on doing it all over again, and before long had booked my first solo-trip abroad to Croatia in the summer of 2017. Quite a scary prospect but I really wanted to make a better travel video, and spent the time between Santorini and the following summer learning a bit about video editing and also bought myself a drone! The summer came round and off I went to Croatia on a little adventure with the intent on making a fantastic travel video! A combination of iphone footage, my little action camera, and some drone footage allowed me to come up with this effort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lrk2BlJ0t8.

My hobby of videography then branched out into photography as well, and I decided to pick up my first DSLR - a Nikon D3400. Although a great camera for photography, I soon found it was lacking for video purposes and eventually settled on the Sony system which had excellent photo and video features. As I typically work during the day, and have quite a busy schedule outside of my main job, most of my spare time ended up coming at night. Before long, I started taking my camera out at night and experimented with some long exposures, timelapses and shallow depth of field shots which I loved! An idea came to me to try and make a video showing off Aberdeen at night. Over the next few weeks, I started taking little video snippets of some of the sights around Aberdeen city centre, created lots of timelapses of the city centre traffic, and having been inspired by some very creative filmmakers on youtube, I started to think of clever transitions that could go in my video - some of which were very easy to disguise because of it being dark. Eventually, I finished my little project, and it has become my most successful youtube upload to date. Please have a look at it here if you haven't seen it and let me know what you think of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5kBW5XnSLU.

I never expected the response the video got, but decided I enjoyed creating it so much that I saw no harm in using it to launch my own videography business part time on Facebook. At the time of writing this, I'm incredibly proud that the video has over 18 thousand views and 340 likes - absolutely blown away! It even made the news which I find hilarious and ridiculous at the same time!! From this video, I started to get several requests for different jobs, and eventually one friend asked if I would be interested in filming her wedding. An absolutely petrifying thought at the time, I had never thought of offering wedding videography. However, after seeing a friends wedding video and feeling a little disappointed by it, I felt I would be capable of doing at least as good a job as that and figured why not give it a go! In preparation for the wedding, I invested heavily in the additional equipment I felt I would need to be able to film the wedding to the standard I would be happy with - so things like external audio recorders, lavalier microphones, audio cables for connecting to sound systems, additional tripods, additional lenses - the list could go on! I spent the next few months watching youtube videos from Matt whoismatt Johnson to learn all about audio, music licensing, editing and everything else in between until I felt as prepared as I could be for the wedding. With it being two brides that didn't make things any easier!! Find out how I got on in my next Blog post...