What makes a great wedding video // Paula + Shaun – Wedding at Newcastle // Vermont Hotel

Documentary style shoot at the city center of Newcastle | North East wedding videography

We often hear the word “cinematic” for a wedding video. But what really means the word “cinematic” on a video? And what makes a wedding video great?

Today, wedding videographers must be much more than classic videographers. To make a great wedding video story, a wedding videographer must be more like a filmmaker rather than a camera operator. A wedding filmmaker must have the knowledge of a photographer, camera operator, film director, film editor, music producer, sound engineer, documentary videographer, and much more.

His work is based not only to have the right equipment and know-how to handle that, but he has to be a video storyteller from A to Z. All those skills combined with endless hours of editing and color grading, give a cinematic look to the final wedding video which is made to be a forever long-lasting memory for the wedding couple, their family and their friends.

In other words, wedding videography as the term itself suggests is a part of video production. On the contrary, wedding cinematography is about cinema, movies, or film production. A cinematographer's work involves a more complex cinematic process as compared to the videographer, who just deals with a simple video.

Recently, we shot the wedding of Paula and Shaun at Newcastle. It was a real challenge for our team, as we had to deal with an amazing young couple at a fabulous place. Newcastle is a busy city so it’s always a challenge to shoot a wedding there. They organized their wedding in less than 20 days, but at the end of the day, it was like the event being organized by professionals and for many months.

The challenge was to prepare a storyboard on very short notice, to study a lot before the wedding day about the shooting points, to prepare a timeline, and finally to have more than 7 (yes… seven) hours of total footage to make 10-12 minutes of a final wedding film.

As you can see at the random selected stills below, every single image (captured from the video footage) can easily stand as a masterpiece picture by itself. Every single still is a well-captured still frame using only natural light.

Every still is as it came straight from the camera… No editing, no color grading yet. And we are so proud of the result. Many thanks to Newcastle Vermont Hotel for having us all day long, to the photographers of the wedding @facebook.com/RGMphoto (really great professionals and great guys too), and of course to our lovely couple Paula and Shaun !

Stay tuned… for the final video in the next weeks.

Hope Visual Productions team - Newcastle / North East wedding videography