Weddingbee Blog

From the Baconator’s days as a green aproned coffee superstar, we’ve made a few awesome friends that are in art school for things like photography and video editing. We initially wanted one of them to do our photography, but eventually decided that we didn’t want an untrained hand taking the wedding pics since he wouldn’t know which shots he really had to get. Instead, we talked to him about filming the big day since we knew that he’d be awesome at editing the footage and it would be easy for him to film the wedding milestones: ceremony, speeches and first dances. Besides, we were on the fence about professional videography, anyway, so this was really win-win. One big problem: he didn’t have an HD camera, and neither did we.

We remembered that our DOC mentioned that they gave the groomsmen flip video cameras as gifts and got great footage that they just had edited together into a wedding video. Great! We could do the same thing, but with 5 selected guests and get all the cameras back at the end of the night. But where do we get enough little video cameras at a cheap price to distribute to some trusted guests without breaking the bank? Enter Black Friday. We sat around on Thanksgiving combing through the newspaper ads looking for deals and spotted video cameras on sale for 50% off during doorbusters at Staples, of all places. With turkey filled bellies, we all went to bed early and were on our way to the mall by 6 AM. By 7:30 AM, we were the happy owners of 5 half-priced video cameras! With the cameras in our possession, we were in a great spot and were excited to talk to our friend about editing.

Sadly, we found out around the holidays that he is going to be leaving Chicago before the wedding and could no longer commit to taking care of our wedding video. It was on to plan B:

My parents have an employee that would edit it together for us for a couple hundred dollars. We were still under the video budget, so no biggie, we had a solution.

Then in March, we got one of those wedding group deals featuring a company, Wedit, that specializes in exactly what we wanted to do. They send you 5 HD FlipCams that you have your guests use to film the wedding, then you send them back the footage with some songs you’d like included in the video and they professionally edit it together. Voila! We were able to get the cameras, editing (a long version and a short 2 minute highlight reel), web hosting and a bunch of DVDs for less than what we spent on those standard definition cameras at Black Friday. We checked out the company across every review site we could think of and bought the deal.

Molly and Nick Wedit Trailer from Dan Cytacki on Vimeo.

We know that it’s a lot of pressure to be the guest responsible for filming the ceremony, so we’re going to set up one of the cameras on a tripod so that there will be at least one steady shot of the whole shebang. I’m hoping that having friends and family manning the cameras will mean that we’ll get tons of different perspectives and I can’t wait to see what they capture!

Um, Miss Bacon, did you forget about those other 5 cameras you already own?? What about those? Surprisingly, my boss has what we affectionately call his “eBay Empire,” so he is going to try and get our money back for the cameras which should be easy since we bought them half off! When all is said and done, we’re going to end up spending less than half of the video budget, even after all those extra cameras.

Are you having a videographer or going the semi-DIY route like we are? Would you want to be a guest filming the ceremony?