Your Wedding Isn't One Day Any More. So Why Is Your Video?

Ask most couples when their wedding starts and they won't say "3pm on the Saturday". They'll say Friday, when everyone arrives. Or Thursday, if there's a barn to decorate and a marquee going up.

The wedding industry hasn't quite caught up with this. Venues are booked for the weekend. Guests take days off. Whole families travel and stay. And then the videographer arrives at ten on the Saturday morning, leaves after the first dance, and everything either side of that window simply doesn't exist on film.

That gap is the reason a lot of couples end up slightly disappointed with their wedding video, even when the video itself is beautiful.

What actually happens outside the ten hours

Think about where the best stories from a wedding weekend usually come from.

The welcome drinks on the Friday, when nobody is nervous yet and your uni friends meet your aunt for the first time. The morning of, in a kitchen, with too many people and one hairdryer. Your dad quietly practising his speech in the garden. The late, late end of the night when the playlist has given up and fifteen people are still going.

And then the morning after. Bacon sandwiches, everyone in yesterday's clothes, someone still wearing a bow tie. Couples describe this as their favourite part of the whole weekend more often than you would expect, and almost nobody has it on film.

None of that is a criticism of videographers. A good one does an outstanding job of the hours they are booked for. But they are booked for hours, and a weekend has rather a lot of them.

Why we can film the whole thing

We don't send a person. We post you a box of small 4K cameras before the wedding, and you keep them.

That single difference changes what gets filmed. There's no clock running, no overtime, nobody packing up at eleven because the contract says so. The cameras are in your house on the Thursday and still there on the Tuesday. If something worth filming happens, someone films it.

It also changes who does the filming. Your friends are in the kitchen at 8am. They're at the pub the next morning. They're the ones your grandmother will actually talk to. A stranger with a large camera changes a room slightly, however good they are. The people who were already there don't.

Our editors then take everything that comes back and cut it into a proper film. You are not left with 200 clips on a memory card and good intentions.

When your wedding is genuinely more than a weekend

For a lot of couples this stops being a nice extra and becomes the only sensible option.

Multi-day and cultural celebrations. A Hindu or Sikh wedding with a mehndi, a ceremony and a reception across three days would need a videographer booked three times over, and most couples take one look at that number and film nothing. A Jewish wedding with a Friday night dinner has the same problem. We film all of it for the same price, because the cameras are simply with you the whole time. One couple this year had a Catholic ceremony, an Indian ceremony and a reception inside a single week, and it made no difference to the cost.

Two events, weeks apart. A civil ceremony now and the big party later is increasingly common, and so is a UK celebration after a wedding abroad. Both are two bookings for a videographer and one booking with us - our "additional days" product allows our customers to extend the rental time to cover situations like this. 

Weddings abroad. If you fly out on the 3rd, marry on the 11th and come home on the 17th, the cameras are in your suitcase for a fortnight. That's fine. It also means your film becomes the whole trip rather than one afternoon: the airport, the villa, the supermarket run for forty people, the hungover boat trip the day after. Those days are the reason everyone flew out, and no videographer would ever have been booked for them.

How the rental works, and how to extend it

Every package includes a one week rental. It starts the day before the wedding and runs for seven days, which covers a normal Friday to Sunday weekend without you doing anything at all.

If you need them for longer, you add extra days at a small daily rate when you order. There's a calculator on the additional rental time page that works it out from your dates, so you're not guessing.

Two things worth knowing if you're going abroad. Switch the calculator to "Destination Wedding" and it starts the clock the day before you fly, not the day before the wedding, because you need the cameras packed. And it runs to the day you get home, since nobody expects you to post cameras back from a beach in Puglia. Bring them home, post them back, done.

A few things worth filming that people forget

• The venue empty, before anyone arrives. It never looks like that again.
• Whoever is doing a speech, quietly panicking beforehand.
• Guests arriving and finding each other. This is where the hugs are.
• The last twenty minutes of the night, not just the first dance.
• Breakfast the next morning. Genuinely, this is the one couples ask us about most.

The short version

A wedding video that covers ten hours of a three day event isn't a wedding video, it's a highlight of one afternoon. If your celebration is bigger than that, and most now are, film the whole thing.

Cameras arrive before it starts. They go home when it's over. Everything in between is yours.

Filming weddings across the UK and US since 2013.