Weddingbee Blog

Oh? What’s that? You thought my last recap about our Sunday-after luncheon was my last post? No way! I’ve still got a couple more things to share before I say goodbye, and I wouldn’t leave you all without a proper farewell post!

I wanted to share with you our “behind the scenes” wedding video. One of my good friends, who couldn’t make it to our wedding, put this together for us and gave it to me last week as a surprise. He does video editing as a hobby, and he took bits and pieces of video that several of our guests filmed and created a mash-up video.

I’m calling this a behind-the-scenes video because it’s definitely not a wedding video. All of the (bumpy and grainy) filming was done by amateurs on low-quality cameras, and because my friend who edited it only had a small selection of video to work with, there’s no real timeline flow. And our guests, not being pros, filmed things more like flies on a wall, so the footage my friend had to work with was really random.
All that said, though, I think it’s pretty fun to actually see our wedding (and a little bit of our after party) from behind the scenes. Having a videographer was never a priority in our budget, so this is definitely better than nothing! And it was free!

So here it is, the effort of several of our wedding guests and a good friend. The whole video is about 10 minutes long, but it includes a little of our ceremony and us reading our vows that we wrote, so feel free to skip that (from one minute in through about four-and-a-half minutes) if you like!

The Colas’ Behind-the-Scenes Wedding Video from MsCola on Vimeo.

So what do you think? Not too bad for the cost of $0!

And this just goes to show that you can still have something to look at even if you don’t have the budget for a professional videographer—you just need a few willing guests with video cameras. And in all honesty, any wedding video we would have paid for would have been something we’ll only look at a handful of times throughout our lives, so I know we made the right decision by not hiring a videographer, especially now that we have this.

Are you having a videographer for your wedding? Or are you hoping your guests will take some free video for you on their personal cameras? And is anyone considering just renting higher quality cameras for a few select friends to use, for a cheaper-than-pro-videography option?