Boy meets girl in scenic settings. It’s love at first sight. Romance blossoms, he proposes and she accepts. They tie the knot and walk away into a panoramic horizon.
This mushy romantic tale is one of the many scripted by wedding videographers, complete with music and beautifully framed dreamy shots. Starring in these videos are starry-eyed brides and grooms from all over Kerala. Along with big fat weddings and boutique parties, wedding videography too has had a filmy makeover to cater to the selfie generation. Each wedding is documented and captured in an entire range of videos clippings of different durations.
Highlights videos, wedding film/movie or wedding documentary are how these collection of vignettes are referred to.
“While the highlight video is just a five-to seven-minute short film of the entire wedding that captures the mood of the event, the wedding documentary is slightly longer and covers important ceremonies of the wedding. In the wedding movie, the team come up with a story and script in consultation with the clients and visuals are shot according to the storyboard,” says Nisam Basheer, who runs Kochi-based Gang Media Factory with friends Khalid Rahman, Jimshi Khalid and Vishnu Thandassery.
One groom even flew the entire videography team to Singapore just for a post-wedding photo shoot!
Instead of lengthy videos that show guests chomping away or boring shoots of the relatives, cinematic videos of less than 10 minutes duration are the in thing.
New-age wedding videographers [read, cinematographers] plan story boards for the wedding and create stories, events and sequences with the couple, their friends and families chipping in to provide plenty of fun and drama. While teary parents talk about their children and their hopes for their future, the bride and the groom speak in suitably modulated tones about their dreams of life. Pre- and post-wedding shoots, mostly outdoor ones, complete the scene. Then these professionally shot clippings with air brushed snaps of the couple find their way into social media to be liked and shared. Some of these have gathered one lakh likes and views! That is what brings in the business for the canny videographers.
“Life has become so fast that people don’t have the patience and time to watch a two- to three-hour wedding video. They prefer a capsule format that captures the finest moments of the function, with a lot of cinematic elements thrown in,” says Nithin George, who runs Kochi-based Happily Ever After with wife, Ria, and friend, Riyas K. S.
Seamless narrative That means there is a seamless flow of scenes, just like telling a story on screen. “We sit with our clients and listen to their story, especially if it is a ‘love marriage’. In some cases we include bytes from their family and friends,” Nithin adds.
The fact that these videos are only a few minutes long makes them easy to be shared via social networking sites or Whatsapp.
High-end equipment and a large crew get down to work to capture the occasion from every possible angle.
“At least three cameras, helicams, sliders, gliders, gibs, interchangeable lenses… are part and parcel of the whole arrangement. Clients even insist on seeing the wedding highlight video first before watching the full video or even the wedding album,” says Sujith Framehunt of Framehunt, based in Kottayam.
Tough competition It is on the editing table that real creativity comes into play to create the effects and the story. “There is unbelievable competition now. Even when we select a particular song, we have to ensure that it is not used by another company,” says Sineesh Weva, who runs Weva Photography with Rohith Weva.
That’s one of the reasons why they go in search of variety. Sujith, for example, used a Telugu song from the movie Dookadu , for a Malayali wedding, which in turn got him clients from outside Kerala.
The videos also make actors out of their clients. “Some clients are cooperative, some are too shy to face the camera. We just make them relax in each other’s company and capture the best moments,” says Sujith. These exclusives often come at a huge price, costing anywhere between Rs. 60,000 and Rs. six lakh. Looks like couples these days will go to any length for that picture perfect wedding.
Celebrity weddings
Recently the wedding highlights videos of Amala Paul–Vijay wedding and Fahadh Faasil – Nazriya Nasim wedding went viral. Happily Ever After team shot the former, incorporating moments from the sangeeth, wedding and reception. Gang Media Factory posted the latter, with highlights from the wedding, the family meet and the reception.
