Wedding Videographers Take Cues From Reality TV
by Jennifer Gish, Albany (N.Y.) Times Union

String music plays as the camera pans through the well-kept housing development and sweeps over the flower garden outside the bride's home.

Cut to the front door, where the camera lingers on a wreath and dramatically pauses before the door opens to reveal the smiling bride, just back from the hairdresser. She creeps upstairs toward her wedding gown, which hangs in the shadows.

A close-up of the dress captures each button and frill. Cutting back to the bride, she stands at the top of the stairs, turns her head and smiles over her shoulder at the bridesmaids giggling at the foot of the stairs.

Brett Wasserman smiled as he watched the video. He's not the groom, but the videographer.

A new wave in wedding videography leans more toward Sundance Film Festival than every last step of the dollar dance with cousin Joey.

Reality television spoiled us all with crafty editing and funky angles. Now, brides and grooms seek a distilled, flashy version of their monumental day, rather than the documentaries that couples settled for in the past.

Besides, the MTV generation simply doesn't have the attention span to sit through four hours of wedding footage, said John Zale, of the Las Vegas-based Wedding and Event Videographers Association.

The move toward more cinematic wedding coverage began in the late 1990s, Zale said, and it shows up in more than half the industry's work.

"It is not a sequence of events that went on the tape. It is like an art, a really good movie," said Jenny Lvovsky, a South Carolina woman who hired Wasserman to videotape her daughter's wedding last August.

Wasserman will spend a week or two holed up in the production studio at his Guilderland, N.Y., home, editing wedding footage into something happy newlyweds will be eager to pass out to their friends and family as keepsakes.

He captures details like the reception food (couples pay a lot for it, so why not remember it?), works on smooth transitions and edits long religious rituals during the wedding ceremony into brief montages with organ music.

As the technology to produce that kind of work became more affordable and more available, people like Wasserman and Matt Pezzula, owner of Storybook Weddings in Albany, N.Y., bought in.

In addition to his other equipment and extra videographer, Pezzula arrives at weddings with a camera mounted to a 12-foot crane so he can capture sweeping vistas of guests arriving at the ceremony. He also takes the bride and groom to a park days before the wedding to talk about how they met and why they've decided to say "I do." Their commentary then provides the back story for the video, a little narration that can be employed during otherwise quiet parts of the film.

And when should-be-quiet parts are interrupted, Wasserman can usually deal with it.

As he edited one ceremony, the microphones also picked up a sniffling, snorting bride who shed some happy tears at the altar after her vows.

"I've got to take care of that snort," Wasserman said, and with a few clicks of the mouse — gone.

Yet glamour comes at a price.

Artful wedding videography ranges in price from $2,500 to as much as $5,000, videographers said, above the $1,000 to $2,000 typically paid for a more traditional taping.

Couples pay more because of the time it takes to edit these types of videos, Wasserman said.

But in the end, they'll have something more than photographs can provide, and they'll be able to relive the big day as long as they both shall live (and own a DVD player).

Rebecca Kobos said she was stunned by the wedding video Wasserman made for her four years ago, which she pulls out every year to celebrate her anniversary and can now watch with her 1-year-old daughter.

She's shown her friends the "montage," a three- to five-minute recap of the wedding usually set to the couple's favorite song.

"He really kind of homed in on what was unique about our wedding," said Kobos, whose wedding smacked of her Italian heritage, particularly in the reception menu. "I remember these aerial shots of my mom's cookies," she said.

South Shore Videographers

This article originally appeared here.

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