Limbo, Trailers and lots of talking.

Here I sit now in rendering limbo so I thought I'd update you all.

The First thing to report is that I've now posted a new teaser trailer on line, this can be found either on the website www.joandpetewedding.co.uk or on my youtube channel here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiDWzNBgqGs . I'd always planned on doing a trailer but knowing that Jo and Pete were both excited about seeing some footage spurred me on and it was a nice way to get me back into the editing frame of mind after a week off. The trailer actually turned out a lot different to the first cut of it. I wanted to use some footage that Neil (my fellow cameraman) shot on his journey over here and also some music he recommended but after having cut it together i couldn't quite make it work.

On to the actual DVD then. I've finished putting together the footage of outside the church which wasn't really a lot so it's not the longest segment in the dvd. I think this is another way in which this dvd differs from the others, normally the photos are taken at the church so the whole after the church and photos footage are normally put together in one whole segment. It actually turned out to be a good thing, not just because the Old Plough is a much better looking venue for photos but it gave me a chance to be a bit more creative with one of our normal wedding dvd staples. I'll explain, usually we film the journey from the church to the reception venue and speed it up and use it as a transition from the ceremony to the reception, because the bulk of the footage is at the reception I used it as an opportunity to show the reception/photo footage and breaks up the journey footage so it doesn't feel too much of a long watch and hopefully wont be one of those scenes thats always being skipped on the chapter select, If I do say so myself though it works really well.

So now i'm up to the speeches and the reason i'm in said rendering limbo (thanks for the long speeches guys) when I first skipped through the footage during my sorting phase at the start of al of this I was worried about the audio not sounding so great from the sound system, luckily though I've had another listen and all is well. This is the audio from the camera we had placed at the back, the sound is even better from the camera I was using since I was in the front row next to the top table, cant use it though, take this as a tip when filming any live event where audio is going to be the key element......move away from small talkative children!. Now I tend to not worry about kids making general kids noises because hey this is a live event and it's something I have no control in so I just carry on and hope it's not too intrusive with the audio. However when the child is your two year old who you have to sit next to because your wife is the chief bridesmaid and is on the top table things are different, and when that two year old is constantly declaring that they want to get out of the high chair that I put them in to stop them running around during dinner and that they want to go to the toilet, it pretty much makes that entire audio track unusable. On a good not though the audio quality is excellent so my choice in camera is justified.

So thats it for now once the speeches are done then it'll be on to the home stretch as far as the main bulk of it is concerned so hopefully I should have another update for you soon.

Steve

Confused about the picture? I typed "in Limbo" into google images and that was one of the pictures to come up, it completely irrelevant to the subject but hey who doesn't love Gizmo?

The Ceremony, The Affair? and a Zombie Movie

It's now the 16th of August and I know your all eager to find out what been going on for all this time since the last post and also why the delay, well don't worry I've have been busy working on the DVD this whole time......ok fine I did go a way for a few days but it was no where exotic I promise......and I was thinking about the DVD the whole time...Ok i'm going to get off this train of thought because now it sounds like i'm trying to defend my part in an affair which is probably inappropriate talk for a wedding DVD blog.

Where was I, so before I went off on my affair erm, holiday I can now report that I managed to finish the ceremony (pause for cheers and applause) now hopefully the next couple of sections should fly past as they don't really involve any need for synching videos and are more just about selecting clips. What I like about this part is again having time to look through the footage fully and discovering little moments that the couple will have missed because of the craziness of the day and anyone who's already had their wedding day will know that these things fly by so fast that these things are easily missed. On the flip side though I did see some things that have terrified me to my core and I'm still having nightmares about now (thanks Andy), still on the bright side it's another shot for my Zombie Wedding Movie.

So just a brief one for the moment but the next one will more than likely be when I'm doing the speeches so hopefully blog soon.

Steve

P.S. Sorry if the title sounds like a cross between a The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and a Richard Curtis movie

A Canadian Mountie and lots of Cameras

Here we are then on the 3rd of August and just over a week since I last posted, so for that I wanted to apologise for leaving you all waiting this long for the next thrilling instalment of this blog.......ahem.

So right now i've got a rough version of the introduction done, by rough I mean that it still needs some titles added and i'll more than likely throw a few extra bits in later down the line as I spot them whilst going through other footage. In case you're wondering, yes I did find the perfect music I was looking for but it was the one piece of music I wanted to avoid using, largely because I knew that I would be using it later on in the DVD and I avoided listening to it right until the end of my search but I knew from the second it started that it was the song I'd been looking for, in the end though I went with it, the way I see it other films can get away with repeating a song or part of the score over and over again, some of them so much that you want to press the mute button and then burn your remote control so that the sound may never be turned up again. There was of course a temptation to use another piece of music. I'll explain, as this is then end of our trilogy it's been quite tempting to put in a couple of throw backs to past DVDs we've done, either references to things from behind the scenes or to use certain songs that had been used previously. When I first started editing these I used to love using the insrumental version of the theme song from the TV show Due South, a show which I used to love and I think I used t a few times either for Intros or the background music for the DVD menus, so I almost used it for this...but rather than let this spiral into a nostalgia project I'm leaving this as It should be and that is Jo and Petes wedding and i'm going to try and make it as individual to them as I can and anything else can be left for DVD extras.

Don't worry because I haven't been working this long and only just finished the intro, I'm also most of the way through the ceremony, which I have to say has been more of a challenge this time. It's been worse, especially when at one point I was using windows movie maker which only let you work with one video and one audio track, which also needed the use of my limited maths skills, in fact looking  back now I'm surprised any of it was in sync or even made sense. This is the longest service i've worked on clocking in at around 45 minutes and it's also the first time we've used three cameras or four if you count the camera solely capturing audio. So this has seemed like a longer process this time around, on the up side though is that using more cameras means that everything is covered and in the event of a missed shot or some severe shaky cam i've always got two other shots to choose from so hopefully the whole thing will be a lot more varied by the end of it.