The Royal Wedding – the missing person

What a magnificent wedding! The marriage of William and Kate will be an example for couples planning their weddings for a long time, but I wonder how many noticed the missing person? The photographer.

No cameraman walked backwards down the aisle in front of the couple as they left the Abbey, nor even as the bride arrived with her father; no cameraman wandered around during the service or stood on the pews to get his shot. It was a great example of a 21st century wedding with most of it captured by unseen television cameras and tiny radio microphones – and the same philosophy and techniques are available to you for your wedding.

Of course, millions of still frames were photographed from distance using telephoto lenses and Hugo Burnand, the official photographer, had a specific (and reportedly short) time for the formal photographs, but how refreshing it was to see a wedding which wasn’t organised like a “Hello” or “OK” photoshoot.

The combination of three-camera video and formal photographs is now an established package at PHP Weddings. By collaborating with the noted stills photographer, John Brandwood, we are able to offer our clients the ideal 21st century wedding solution – High Definition recording, a total of five Blu-ray and DVD videos and three albums of still photographs plus all the extras including honeymoon video camera, DVD invitations, digital photo frame etc. Top value and best quality.

All that glisters ….

That Shakespeare knew a thing or two even if he didn’t realise that the word glister would become glitter and thereafter he would invariably be misquoted.

Making less worthy things glisten more than they justify has become the advertising man’s forté. Take for instance HD or High Definition. By reducing the term to mere shorthand, today it can legally be applied to cameras costing from £250 to £50,000 or more, yet the results delivered by the two extremes are so far apart as to remove any meaning from the term HD entirely.

Indeed when potential clients tell us their friends “HD wedding video on a Blu-ray disk” didn’t look any different from some of the weddings they’d seen on DVD, we have to resist a technical explanation that will send them to sleep faster than Horlicks – and mean about as much also!

The same goes for “Broadcast” grade. There was a time when all television equipment in the UK did conform to a standard, largely set by the BBC and ITA, which ensured that most television programmes met a certain quality standard. But satellite broadcasting’s insatiable appetite for something to broadcast in between the adverts, and the willingness of mid-western police departments to sell the outdated VHS tapes recorded in their patrol cars, put paid to that. To the point when although the main broadcasters invest in the best quality equipment available for their mainline programmes, there is much that is broadcast which frankly demeans the term.

So what is the non-technical bride or groom to do? Here’s some key advice:

1 Ask if your programmes will look as good as the demo disk. Here I’m reminded by a correspondent that the disk on which the programme is recorded (DVD or Blu-ray) will have its own limitations but of course they’ll apply to all programmes.

2 Ask what the production company will do if their programme runs over about 80 minutes – if the company doesn’t say they’ll either use a dual-layer disk or two single-layer disk, beware because they’re going to squeeze on more programme by reducing the image quality.

3 If you are prepared to be baffled by waffle, ask them what bit-rate their cameras record at.

If they say 50Mbit/s (megabits per second) your video should look as good as a top-line drama sold on disk by the BBC or ITV. You can also expect to pay an arm and a leg for your wedding video because their investment in cameras will be huge.

If they say 35Mbits/s you’ll be getting a top quality wedding video at a price you can afford which will be barely distinguishable from the best recorded programmes.

If they say anything less, – well, you know the rest.

But it will still be HD; just remember the Bard’s caution, all that glisters isn’t gold.

Better than a chocolate fountain

The day of the DJ – and I mean Disk Jockey, not Dinner Jacket or any other variation – has passed. No more the heavy boxes of records or even CDs, no more enough equipment to start a radio station. Today’s recorded music “introducer” comes equipped with two I-Pods, a minute mixer and a couple of speakers.

In fact, even this DJ is becoming a thing of the past. Not a few couples are creating their own playlists on their I-Pods, hiring an amplifier and providing precisely their own music.

At the same time other entertainers are appearing at weddings. Clowns and Balloon Benders for the children, casino tables with professional croupiers for the Las Vegas theme and even live bands playing everything from the hits of the 60s to the current chart music.

For my money the best value are the Singing Waiters – and I use the term generically, just in case there’s an act by that name.

We recorded one group of three tenors at a wedding we recorded at Elvetham Hall in Hampshire last summer. The singing was good, the choice of music ideal, in fact only an occasional lapse in microphone technique made the group anything but perfect.

What impressed us particularly was the way the waiters/tenors made sure they were seen and identified as serving staff before their act started. They wore the hotel’s uniform neckties and helped to serve the wedding breakfast and clear the empty dishes along with the regular staff. Thus when the leader introduced himself as Signor Barberoi, the Catering Manager, the guests, who knew nothing of the surprise, were ready to believe.

Twenty five minutes later the audience had been transformed from a polite wedding winding down after a dignified and beautifully staged wedding into party people ready to dance the night away.

Obviously a big part of the act depends on keeping the audience wondering as long as possible whether they are real waiters or real tenors. A measure of their success occurred in the kitchen as the cooking staff handed five plated meals to each server to take to the tables. So convincing was the ruse that the kitchen staff were taken aback when a waiter protested that he was a tenor not silver service and carrying only two plates was his limit.

Don’t get taken for a ride.

PHP Weddings are different to most of its competitors in a number of ways; our proper, one-to-one interviews, our “Sound of Music” shot, a free video camera for your honeymoon and the fact that you don’t pay the full price before your wedding are just a few.

Another difference is our single, all-inclusive price.

Most of our competitors offer a range of prices, ostensibly to reflect the cost of having different amounts of coverage on the day. In fact, because so much of the job is done after the wedding day, the range of packages is only there to create a low start price, a loss-leader like the below-cost loaf or cheap bag of sugar to get you into the supermarket.

In reality almost every couple buys the most expensive package, after all who wants a video of only half their wedding?

But there’s a new twist to this sales technique going on in the Manchester area. At least one wedding video and photography company now offers no less than six different packages, starting at a few hundred pounds for a single camera, single operator coverage of the ceremony to a two-camera, two-operator Platinum package covering the whole day at £2000.

However, regardless of the package couples order, the company sends along the whole team and records all day long. The material is then edited according to the company’s Platinum package.

Now we all know how enthralled couples are to see their wedding video for the first time. That’s when our competitor tells them that what they’re seeing is actually the more expensive package which will cost them up to £1400 more. They can, of course, wait for a few more
weeks whilst the company edits the material to the lower standard that they originally paid for, but in fact, having seen the better quality production most couples find a way to stretch to the new higher price the company wants for its Platinum package.

I’m quite sure it’s not dishonest in the literal sense of the word but it does strike me as rather immoral.

And it’s one of the reasons with all our demonstration disks we include a Value Comparison chart which enables couples to calculate what other people’s various packages are really going to cost them and see why PHP Weddings really are the best value wedding video production company, bar none.

I blame Patrick Swayze ….

It’s becoming increasingly popular for couples to have their first dance choreographed professionally and then taught to them over the weeks before the wedding. Perhaps it’s a left-over from Dirty Dancing in which the late and wonderful Patrick Swayze persuaded men they
weren’t pansies if they swung their hips and expressed their emotions through dance. More likely it’s because if Mark Ramprakash and Darren Gough can do it without any gags about their sexuality, so can our man.

I can imagine that brides too, revelling in their full dresses, enjoy the sensation of twirling and “sashaying” around the floor in time to a favourite song.

As a video producer I certainly find it more satisfying to record a choreographed performance rather than the traditional “Hollywood Shuffle” which was a simple contrivance to have each of the dancers facing the camera to deliver their lines.

But it isn’t as easy as the choreographers, on Strictly as well as at your local dance school, make it look. It takes practice and commitment, probably a little talent and certainly bags of enthusiasm. And it can still go wrong – for a number of reasons.

Firstly the songs couples choose are invariably their favourites and mean something to them. Sadly that doesn’t necessarily make them good songs to dance to. Unless you’re well into dancing, it’s sensible to choose a song with a well-defined, constant beat and a tempo you can dance to without being a Fred Astaire. My advice would be to take a list of your favourites to your choreographer and let them choose one that works.

Secondly, discuss with your choreographer what sort of dance you want to be taught. Often couples seem to be led towards what are essentially “show” dances. That’s fine if head flips and leg kicks come naturally to you. Unless you’re comfortable with that sort of dance my
advice would be to ask your choreographer to teach you a fairly standard cha-cha-cha, samba or beguine and embelish it with some twirls and spins for the bride to show off her dress.

The advantages are that you’ll have something in your skill stock that can be brought out whenever you’re dancing and you’ll not feel uncomfortable performing the moves on your wedding day.

Finally, gentlemen, whilst you’re rehearsing please remember that on the wedding day your partner may well be wearing a much fuller dress than she’s ever worn with you before. It might well be dirty dancing but not as Patrick showed us and you’ll certainly get nul points for standing all over your bride’s dress!

As an old-time photographer told me ….

I had lunch the other day with a photographer – actually the photographer who first recommended I come into wedding video production (he knew our ethos and commitment to quality from way back when we worked together ). As we drank our coffee, our waitress,
noticing us looking at a new piece of kit my friend has just bought, remarked that she’d graduated from photo college last July but couldn’t get work.

We got chatting and when she learned that my pal was a long-established wedding photographer she revealed that her passion was portraiture.

“Ah,” he said, gesturing towards me, “the one area of our work in which my friend and I don’t overlap.”

He explained that for a young photographer to break into weddings was made more difficult these days because clients so often choose a reportage or an informal style of photography.

“The thing is that if photographers are honest, they’ll admit that the video makes a much better job of capturing friends and family behaving naturally ie informally, because they record sound and movement as well as images. But, the one thing the video people can’t do is the portraiture, the formal groups and the bride and groom, the pictures everyone actually wants on the day whether they tell you so or not when they’re briefing you.”

The waitress looked a little confused. “So what you’re saying is that I should take on a job paying maybe £300 when I could be getting the whole job and earning four or five times that?” she asked.

“Yes but you’re not getting the whole job are you? You’re waiting on tables,” said my pal, always a little forthright. “If I was you I’d talk to this man,” he said pointing at me, “who makes very good wedding videos, and persuade him to offer a new style of wedding photography/video service, combining video and portraiture. You’ll only be working for a couple of hours on each job, so you’ll have plenty of time to develop your regular portraiture business.”

We did talk and indeed since then I’ve talked with a number of portrait specialists. But what do you think? Is the tradition of the wedding photographer still strong or do your friends take such wonderful snaps with their modern digital cameras that you really only need the
photographer to take the formals?

Since our lunch, this photographer and I have added a new service to our portfolios – a combination of our two skills – for a very competitive price.

A persuasive experience

All the research wedding magazines carry out continues to show that couples rank the
importance of having a wedding video much, much higher after their wedding than before.
It’s as if they’ve realised at the wedding that the day is passing before them in a joyous blur
and that at least some of their family and friends won’t be around at their next family event.

Conveying this to couples I meet at Wedding Fairs and other events needs tact and discretion
and both of those need time which we don’t always have at the larger fairs. Even putting it in
print on our website needs careful phrasing so it was with great pleasure I discovered the
following passage in Donald Spoto’s biography of Ingrid Bergman which I read recently.
I’ve paraphrased it a little due to space constraints but it carries most of the dialogue from the
original.

In 1979 Ingrid Bergman, already diagnosed with cancer, was honoured at a dinner held at
Warner Bros Burbank studio – where Casablanca’s interiors had been shot 37 years earlier.
In response to the many tributes, she showed and narrated a black and white film.

“When my father discovered something new had happened – motion pictures,” she explained,
“he was so enthusiastic that on my birthdays and special days, he rented a hand-cranked
movie camera.” The film flickered on to the screen. “That’s me on my mother’s lap, my
grandparents are behind me. That was my first screen appearance, one year old in 1916.

Now here, I am two years old, and there is my mother who pushed me around in my little
wheelbarrow – my first stage prop.

Now there is my mother – and how happy that makes me – since there I can see her move and
smile. I didn’t know what to do in the scenes, nobody gave me direction, but here I am three
years old and I am coming to my mother’s grave, I am putting flowers on her grave.

You can understand why I am so happy to have those earlier shots, where I can see her move
and smile and hold me up – how lovely that was.”

I don’t think I could have put it better.

Respecting the ceremony

One November, a few years ago I was making a video programme for a museum in the French Alps. It included a ceremony to honour Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory who, in 1945, died in a crash above the village in which the museum stands. A friend of mine, an accomplished cornetist, was playing the Last Post – the RAF having decided it couldn’t afford a bugler to honour one of its most notable senior officers. We were covering the event with just two cameras, all that the modest budget allowed. The British press was represented by the Daily Telegraph’s then chief correspondent in France, Colin Randall, and an agency photographer. It was cold and snowing yet we all maintained our positions, leaving the focus of the ceremony on the memory of Leigh-Mallory and respect for the bravery of the French villagers who, 60 years earlier, had recovered the bodies from the mountains. Like the press coverage, our programme was widely praised.

I recalled the event as I watched the coverage of the memorial ceremony in Basra to mark the withdrawal of British servicemen. The thing that struck me, apart from some occasional sloppy direction of the television images, was the number of uniformed people treating the ceremony as if it was still the parade ground it is in everyday life. These Army photographers and video cameramen, of whom there seemed an excessive number to do the job, completely ignored the solemnity and dignity of the occasion. Even at the most solemn moments, the playing of the Last Post, and the recitation of the memorial prayer to the dead (“in the morning we shall remember them”), they wandered around, snapping everything that moved like amateurs at a photo fair. Happily neither of my children is in the Forces; had I been one of those whose son or daughter has died in Iraq, I think I would have been very angry at the lack of simple respect these people were showing.

I feel the same way at weddings. As I’ve written before, we video and photo people may be working but that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to respect the dignity of the occasion we are recording. At PHP Weddings we always say that we do not create the wedding but simply record it. Our creativity is worked afterwards in the editing. At our weddings the only stars are the bridal couple – which is the way we believe all weddings should be.

HD is dead – NOT

Just over a year ago, the home entertainment industry announced that Blu-ray disc had won the competition to be the delivery medium for High Definition video recordings. People who remembered the protracted competition between VHS and Betamax videotape breathed a sigh of relief.

Now, less than 12 months later, doomsayers in the business are predicting the demise of Blu-ray.

Why? Well it has nothing to do with the inherent quality of Blu-ray – the visual impact when you see your wedding video on Blu-ray is stunning – a real “blows your socks off” sensation. The reason DVD is maintaining its popularity appears to be a combination of technology and economics.

The economics are simple; whilst the least expensive Blu-ray disc players in the UK still cost around £120.00, DVD players are available for less than £10.00.  More importantly, Blu-ray discs are still significantly more expensive than DVDs for no reason other than the big players in the industry seem intent on squeezing every last penny out of their investment in Blu-ray discs. If films released on Blu-ray disc retailed at the same price as on DVD it would give the sale of Blu-ray players a huge boost.

If that wasn’t enough, the technologists have been improving the quality they can obtain from a DVD by “up-scaling”. DVD players with “up-scaling” circuitry convert the output from the DVD player so that it gives the best results when shown on an HD-Ready or Full HD television screen. And those results really are excellent, particularly if the wedding video has been recorded and edited using true High Definition equipment, as we at PHP Weddings always do.

But let’s be quite clear, “up-scaled” DVDs are not High Definition.

In High Definition on Blu-ray disc, the image quality of our programmes shown on a Full HD screen is truly amazing, the question is whether it’s worth investing in a Blu-ray player and Full HD television today.

Happily, it’s a decision PHP Weddings’ clients don’t have to make because as of 2012 we include one Blu-ray and four first generation DVDs in our single-price service. At the same time we archive all our programmes as High Definition so if, in a few years time, today’s pundits have been proved wrong and Blu-ray is still around, our clients can buy additional Blu-ray and DVD copies of their wedding programmes. With PHP Wedding Video Productions you get the best of both worlds!

Image quality too good!

We learned the other day that a wedding video company in South Manchester recently left one of its customers very unhappy – because the quality of their images was too good.

In fact their images are no better than anyone else’s, but they’d chosen to show the client her wedding video on their premises, played in from their editing computer on their TV monitor. The trouble arose when the programme was converted to a DVD and the client played it on her own equipment at home. Because it didn’t look the same she felt she’d been tricked.

It’s a story that underlines the importance we at PHP Weddings place on having all our programme viewings at our clients homes, on our clients’ equipment. We promise that our customers will not be disappointed and that means taking the trouble to burn a disk for the viewing and showing it on the equipment on which the client will eventually play the finished DVD.

That doesn’t mean our clients always have the latest gear, far from it. What it does mean is that if any question of image quality arises (and it never has, honestly!) we can explain the reason and, if asked, are able to offer some unbiased solutions.