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Wedding Videos: A Report from the Frontier
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I can recall two especially significant moments in my development as a wedding video producer. The first came in June of 1999 as I was editing the wedding of Courtney Cox and David Arquette. I heard a clickety-clack that sounded like a sewing machine in the audio track. The source revealed itself to be a Super 8 camera that a friend of the bride and groom was using to shoot David as he was receiving a close shave inside a vintage barber shop in San Francisco on the morning of the wedding.
Super 8? Cool, I thought.
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The second moment came at the Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara during Labor Day weekend of 2001. I was shooting the wedding of Grammy Award-winning Producer of the Year Walter Afanasieff and actress Christina Brascia. We were using two high definition Sony CineAlta F900 cameras, on loan from Sony Broadcast Corp., a technology so advanced that George Lucas used it to shoot the next two Star Wars films, pioneering the introduction of direct-to-digital in Hollywood motion pictures. To my knowledge, that was the first wedding to be filmed in HD. When Lionel Ritchie sang Three Times a Lady for the first dance of the bride and groom, I melted behind the viewfinder and became a fan. But the greatest moment came later, when my co-camera operator and I reviewed the footage. The HD image quality was so stunningly clear that it was like we were still there, looking through a window.
High definition digital? Wow, I thought. |
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Fast forward to today, my company, Weddings on Film, now combines HD with Super 8 film in our productions. HD is no longer the exclusive realm of über-high-end productions. As the technology trickles down, filmmakers with talent get their hands on low-cost HD cameras and produce some amazing work. My own company made the full conversion to HD this year. But we continue to use film, too. Why? In stark opposition to HD, which is digital, Super 8 film is grainy, contrasted, unpredictable. Sometimes a hair or the odd scratch makes its way into the frame, and this gives the picture a retro-look that we love. But HD is simply the biggest and best thing to happen to television since the conversion from black-and-white to color. HD has at least four times the definition of standard television, and the 16:9 aspect ratio gives it a wide-screen format that resembles the big format of the motion picture screen.
The film and still-photography worlds are buzzing with a continuing film-versus-digital discussion. Both are used by talented people according to their needs. Take Grindhouse, for example—the campy exploitation double-feature collaboration between Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, the Spy Kids series) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Dusk Till Dawn). The first part of the double feature, by Rodriguez, is 100 percent digital, while the second part, by Tarantino, is shot on film. You see where this is going? People can argue about this till they’re blue in the face, but digital is now ready to play side-by-side with film. |
What remains is the question of vocabulary. Cinematographer or videographer? What
determines the designation—the medium used? It’s confusing. A camera operator using digital equipment might call himself a cinematographer because he’s making “cinema,” while another using Super 8 is making a film that will end up on video. When I think of a cinematographer in the classic sense of the word, I envision a person on a movie set, with a full crew, whose sole duty is to collaborate with the director and camera operator as to how to approach and compose a shot. He then selects from a myriad of lenses, carefully choosing the one with the appropriate characteristics to tell the story in line with the director’s vision. This person is a craftsman with untold years of experience who’s climbed his way up the production ladder to achieve this lofty, well-respected position that very few achieve. My personal opinion is that we should leave the word “cinematographer” to those making motion pictures and broadcast television. That said, I also understand that times are changing, as are our definitions.
What ultimately matters is the content. Many tools are available to us for creating images, but capturing the audience is crucial regardless of the medium. Generally
speaking, the camera is not as important as the person operating it. Tools will change
over time, and artists will adapt.
I treasure the nostalgic effects of film, and I’m awed by the stunning, intense clarity
of digital HD. Playing with both, combining and arranging them at will, and even
mimicking different film stocks has become my obsessive way of life. Come see some demos at weddingsonfilm.com and see if you can tell which is which! |
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