I didn’t know the challenges & amount of work involved in covering a wedding. I ended up loosing 40,000 on my first project.
For my first project I just charged Rs. 52,000. It included video shoot of various ceremonies spanning across 4 days & 2 weeks of editing. But it took another 1 month to wrap up the project because everyone from the bride’s family & the groom’s family wanted to provide their feedback.
I wish the customers understood the challenges faced by wedding videographers & didn’t haggle on bringing the price down.
- An 8 hour shoot usually ends up being 12-14 hours
- Capturing actual emotions is very important without any retakes
- Many ceremonies (each religion has their own), some of which is very difficult to capture – Maang bharna, mangal sutra pehnana, phere
- Difficult to manage crowd
- Uneven lighting – you can’t adjust lighting according to you
- You can’t follow any script, have to act on the spot
- If the scenes are missed, editor can’t do anything. He has to smartly sequence so the flow looks right
- Review the entire raw footage (of about 8-12 hrs), compress in about 1 hr by picking the right shots
- Editor has to ensure proper lighting even if the raw footage has bad lighting