A great team is a necessity for wedding cinematographers to produce a great film.
Many couples and planners are still under the impression that a wedding cinematographer is a one-man show with one camera on a tri-pod. Believe it or not, there is much more to it than pressing the record button and out pops a video! Professional wedding cinematography requires many steps and requires specific individuals for certain tasks.

Here are the main areas we focus on in my company:

Production

*Pre-planning

Communicating with the planner and client’s needs for both production and post-production.

*Capturing Content

Filming cinematic shots (movie quality)

Filming documentary style (these are priceless moments that are unpredicted and happen on a moment’s notice)

Audio Engineering (getting professional grade audio is very tricky and
easy to mess up)

*DIT- Digital Imaging Technician

This job requires a very organized and responsible person. Since we do not use a template to create the final product, the footage filmed from one wedding can add up to 100 – 200 GBs of data (for those of you who don’t know that is A LOT of space that is taken up on your computer). It takes several hours to off load the footage onto the computer (we call that “drop” the footage) and on to a hard drive to back it up and organize the moments captured appropriately.

Post Production (4 stage process)

Stage 1 – Editing the footage into a movie or chapters

With three cameras rolling for 10 hours, we are often handling over 20 hours of footage. Filtering through the footage takes a very long time, to ensure the best moments are used in the trailer and feature film.

Stage 2 – Editing the highlight trailer

Creating a completely customized wedding trailer (without a template) is a creative process that can take a very long time and also requires a specific type of focus from someone that knows how to pick out and put together those perfect moments.

Stage 3 – Finalizing the trailer

Adjusting audio, musical timing, and color correction requires another type of skill- a more technical and less creative but nonetheless very important to ensure a great final product.

Stage 4 – DVD authoring, packaging, and delivering

Rendering the movie chapters and wedding trailer onto a DVD menu page that is easy to navigate for the end user is the final step. This task is very technical as incorrect formatting can lead to poor resolution for playback on certain devices. Once the wedding movie and trailer are mapped out onto a menu page, the DVD’s are ready to be burned, packaged, and then shipped out to the customer.

Our specialized team operates with lead camera operators and editors in order to accomplish these tasks successfully. This allows more focus directed towards each specific task, which in turn leads to a great final product!

This article was written by Zane Hauck of Zane Karl Studios.