Video Killed the Wedding Budget

When we first started figuring out our wedding budget, hiring a videographer never even made the list. Actually, it never even crossed our minds. I hadn't even thought of it until I stared wedding surfing on the interwebs. My first thought was what a waste of money. I mean who really wants to sit around and watch that?

Then I saw my friend Sarah's wedding video and it made me want one. Since Sarah also got married on Maui, I contacted her videographer. His prices were fair and I was already to move forward when I realized that there was no way we could afford a videographer. It would completely break our wedding budget and we were already having a hard enough time coming up with the funds for everything. I quickly shelved my idea of having a wedding video. But, I kept thinking about it.

One day I came across the idea of having your friends and family film your wedding video and then sending it somewhere to have it edited. You could even rent small video cameras from different companies to do this. One that I came across was WeddingMix with the tag line, Let the people you care about the most capture your story on video for memories you can't get anywhere else. But I wasn't completely sold.

Then my BFF/MOH sent me an email with the title,  WATCH THIS. In the email I found, a video link and one sentence from her, "It's going to make you cry." And cry I did! I was hooked! I had to have a wedding video! Especially since we were having a destination wedding with very few guests there. It would be so nice to show at our Portland celebration. Yes, my mind changed from no one wanting to watch this to everyone wanting to watch it. But, not a professional one; one we could do ourselves.

What? What's that you say? You want to see the video, too? Oh, here you go. Make sure to grab a couple tissues.



When I got home I showed Drew the video and he liked it, as well. We loved the vintage look and feel to the video. How it was choppy and put together from different video footage that others filmed. How it didn't have any dialogue and how you could still see how happy everyone was. Now we just needed to figure out how we could do a wedding video ourselves.

We didn't have a video camera so I did some research and bought one during the Black Friday sale for a really great price. Since we were going to be on Maui, with lots of sand and water, we thought a sport camera was the best way to go. We ended up getting the waterpoof Kodak Playsport Zx5 in orange. we also got a tripod. We tried the camera out during our Wedding Planning Trip and loved it.

{source}

Next I talked to my BFF/MOH about using her camera, as well. Then we figured out who would be best to do the video. We decided to have my daughter and BFF/MOH's daughter do the filming. It will give them something fun to do during the wedding and is a really important job that we hoped would make them feel special. We also had the tripod so if they wanted to take a break and set the cameras up on that for a bit they could.

Now we had cameras and people to do the filming, but what about editing the video? Lucky for us my friend, Brea, is a brilliant video editor and offered to help us out. Thank goodness! I sent her over the video my BFF/MOH had sent me and let her know that we loved it. She said she'd use it for inspiration. YES!

We may not have been able to get a videographer with our budget, but we were able to come with a solution that worked for us. I can't wait to see how it all comes together!

Have you decided to have a videographer at your wedding or have you come up with another idea?