Moments of Tenderness
Now that everyone and their mums owns an ultra-HD TV, you can rewatch your wedding day over and over in stunning quality for years to come. But how do you make sure all the little things are captured on the day, and how do you get the raw emotions to come through on camera? Jacqueline Foy sits down with Mitchell Yeats, creative director and owner of Limbo Images, to discuss how to capture the tender, authentic moments of your big day
Image Credit: Limbo Images
Yeats loves filmmaking, and especially making wedding videos – they are cinematic pieces that contain so much heart and soul that you can’t help but fall in love with them. The passion he is able to elevate from couples and guests alongside his years of experience ensure he has honed his skills to capture in motion all the big and small emotions that are felt on the day. From a feather touch between the bride and the groom to a sweeping landscape shot to encapsulate the grandness of the scene, come along as we explore the little details that make wedding videography so special.
Never Out Of Style
When you get your wedding video back, you’re seeing all your special moments for the first time. While you get to experience your wedding on the day, you forget so fast and miss many moments as time flies by. Watching back from the outside is a whole new experience. Yeats says having awedding video is just as important as having your photos taken these days: “Think about how you would feel in ten or twenty years’ time and how badly you’d want to experience your wedding day again and the regret you would feel if you didn’t have it captured the right way, or at all,” he says.
When choosing a videographer, the most important thing to consider is your own individual style as a
couple. “Weddings are all different and trends come and go, and come back again,” Yeats says. “In my profession, it’s maintaining consistency and expectation no matter what type of wedding you come across,” he explains.
Things like budget and the packages on offer must also be taken into account, but feeling out the videographer’s filmmaking style is of utmost importance – it is any production company’s standout factor, after all.
Comfort Is Key
To ensure that the video you come away with is truly reflective of you and your partner’s love story, you must be able to open up in front of your videographer, which can be daunting. Yeats says it is essential you find a videographer you click with right away. “The most important factor in this case is if we get along and can have a laugh at our first meeting,” he says. Being as comfortable as you can be allows for the most authentic, candid moments to come through on film.
For the more camera-shy couples, Yeats suggests a small scale, more casual shoot to get warmed up to the often unnatural feeling of having a camera pointed at you. An engagement shoot is a great way to loosen up in front of the camera and get used to your videographer’s methods. “You shouldn’t need to worry about a thing come wedding day,” Yeats says, “we like to joke around and get involved with your bridal party fun, as it’s important to us that our couples have fun and keep having fun, as they give us the best moments to capture!”
As for your videographer, their most valuable trait is their approachability.
The Cinematic Difference
On the day, your videographer and photographer may share a podium, but the biggest difference comes with the application of a narrative. A videographer is able to reconstruct the story of your day, creating a short film with a beginning, middle and end. “Each wedding video must be felt out organically,” Yeats says. “While watching back the day’s vision, I get a sense of where the strong points were, where was the most emotion, where was the most fun, where is that laugh-out-loud moment,” he says.
With this, Yeats is able to feel out and meticulously craft the re-telling of your special day in the editing suite.
Yeats says the stylistic choices in his work are not something that can be taught, but rather come naturally and appear as a pattern across your work over time. For Yeats, long sweeping shots used to give the viewer a sense of how grand the venue is and carefully selecting music to enhance the energy of a scene have become his signatures. “Many of these small stylistic choices come together with practice,” he says.
Feeling The Scene
There is no shortage of special moments at weddings, and for Yeats, being prepared for those moments by having the camera ready at all times is a sure-fire way to catch spontaneous moments and the ones you wait for. The emotion from the vision comes in the details. “Whatever it might be,” Yeats says, “there is a feeling you get from how the
scene fits in the frame.”
You’ll have the mementos from your wedding video forever, and when you re-visit them in years to come, the emotion that shines through within the shots will transport you right back to the moment all over again. Yeats leaves us with these final words: “There can be something extra special about any wedding which always fits perfectly into your video,” he says. It might be as simple as wearing your great grandmother’s hundred-year-old wedding ring, or as out there as an underwater ceremony, but it will make you you.