Well, both of you should win – that’s the idea of marriage, anyway. Today we help you examine the indoor vs outdoor wedding debate from all sides, including that of the wedding videographer!

Indoor Weddings: Consider …
Indoor weddings offer a predictable environment. However, you should remember that:

They might cost more
Many indoor venues will charge you a per-head price to use the space. For a large wedding, an outdoor venue might be more cost effective.

Is there sufficient parking?
Indoor venues usually have a limited amount of parking. Make sure that you won’t be sharing the parking space with too many other cars not from the wedding party.

Space for the wedding videographer
You’ll need to ensure that space is sufficient and that lighting is adequate in an indoor venue to do justice to the ceremony on your wedding video.

Confetti
Don’t use flower petals, as they’ll get stomped on and may well wreck a carpet! Paper confetti is best, as rice can hide in cracks of furniture and attract pests … yuck.

Outdoor Weddings: Consider…
The weather … oh, the weather!
Of course you must consider the weather when planning an outdoor ceremony. Even a marquee might not make the venue suitable if it is raining sideways or the wind is up. You should always have a backup indoor venue for your wedding.

You may need a permit
Sometimes council will require that you have a permit for getting married in a particular outdoor space, and you may be restricted in your choice of day or time, or may have to organise clean-up of the space.

Extra equipment could be helpful
Your wedding videographer may not be able to capture your beautiful vows if they’re obstructed by wind! Microphones and a PA system are a must for most outdoor venues.

Confetti
Flower petals are most appropriate for outdoor weddings.

Walking in heels!
Not always the easiest thing to do in sand or on grass or dirt! Spare a thought for your guests wearing heels as well as your own shoes.

What’s Happening?
Unless you have a very thick skin, the ability to explain the same thing to every single one of your friends without tearing your hair out, and a great sense of humour, don’t book your wedding for April 1 – April Fools’ Day!

Remember also that across Australia, school holidays usually occupy some portion of April, and Easter is most commonly in April. The Anzac Day weekend will be busy also. Many popular holiday destinations will be booked out, some public venues will be occupied with school holiday activities, and the roads will be chock-a-block on some days. This could make it difficult for your guests and other important services, like your wedding videography, to make it where they need to be on time. Allow extra time, and plan ahead for traffic!

Weather
Right in the middle of autumn, there are plenty of opportunities for stunning wedding video and photography shots in April, set against the fiery colours of deciduous trees.

Average temperatures in Sydney are around 20-25 degrees during April – nice and flexible, cool enough to ensure you don’t ruin all those nice clothes with sweat, but warm enough to head outside for a part of your ceremony or some of the wedding videography.

Food and Flowers
Choose seasonal flowers and foods and you’ll not only be in keeping with the spirit of the month, but your catering will be fresher and more delicious and your flowers much cheaper!

April’s seasonal flowers include:
• Acacia
• Astromeria
• Amaranthus, Baby’s breath
• Chrysanthemum
• Gladiolus
• Gerbera
• Orchid
• Queen Anne’s Lace
• Protea
• Sunflowers

And see if your caterers can include the following in your menu:
• Apples
• Chestnuts
• Plums
• Eggplants
• Broccoli
• Carrots
• Celery
• Artichoke
• Cauliflower
• Beetroot

Dates to Avoid
Getting married amidst the rush and bustle of Easter or Anzac Day won’t be ideal, and many of your guests may have other plans for these holidays. Choose a time outside school holidays and public holidays if possible! This will also ensure your wedding videography remains affordable, too.

Offer Guest Meals for Service People
This can be a lovely gesture for smaller weddings. For larger weddings though, the burden of feeding service people with guest meals can be considerable!

Most wedding videographers are appreciative of food if it comes; if it doesn’t, they are equally happy though. This is by no means a necessity! However, some videographers will need a mental break from the environment at some stage, to be able to do their best work. Therefore guest meals shouldn’t necessarily come with the obligation of eating at guest tables.

Meals/Drinks As Part of the Contract
Some wedding videography companies (however, not ours) ask for meals and drinks as part of their service contract. If your wedding videographer has made this part of their contract, etiquette dictates that they should explicitly ensure that you are aware of this before signing the contract. It may not be a large financial burden, but it does add a layer of complexity to the event.

Don’t Arrange Any Hospitality
This is the approach taken by some couples, and it is also perfectly acceptable. After all, you are having a party for your family and friends, not for a half-dozen service providers who you only met a few months ago!

You don’t necessarily need to go out of your way to arrange food, drink or breaks for wedding videographers, but some no-stress welcome strategies might include:
• Letting the caterers know that any uneaten canapés or guest meals can be shared amongst the service people, rather than being binned
• Allowing wedding videographers and other service people a place to store our own lunch or dinner
• Advising us when the best times to have our breaks might be – if there will be a period between the ceremony and reception when some guests will leave, or if you anticipate a long period of dancing and talking which doesn’t all need to be captured on wedding video.

As with many aspects of your wedding, hospitality for wedding videographers and other service people is completely your choice. Discussion and clarity beforehand can make things a little easier for everyone though!

I Don’t Want to Invite Children
In many ways, children and weddings don’t mix. They cry during the ceremony, they won’t eat anything on your delicious planned menu, they get underfoot at the reception and generally destroy your beautifully designed spaces!

Unfortunately, children will be a fact of life for a significant proportion of your guests. You have several options which you’ll need to think VERY carefully about.
• Set an age limit for children coming to the wedding – perhaps no under 3’s or no under 5’s. Make sure your guests know that only older children can come
• Ask all friends and family with children to have a strategy for keeping them quiet during the ceremony
• Allow children at the reception but not the ceremony
• Arrange some form of childcare so that parents can attend the ceremony while their children are being looked after
• Don’t invite any guests that have children …

Make sure you have a good hard think about how you’d feel if you were on the receiving end of any of these stipulations about your children, the most beautiful things in the world in your eyes …

Some of My Guests Live Interstate
Our friendship and family circles are spread wider than ever nowadays. Should you invite those among them that live interstate, or does this impose an unrealistic financial burden?

The key to making this a non-dilemma is a flexible attitude. Invite these guests if they are close friends or family, but make sure they know you won’t be offended if they decide they can’t make it. And send them a copy of your wedding video!

I Don’t Want to Serve Alcohol
Most people expect alcohol at a wedding … but it can cause plenty of problems as well as ‘greasing the wheels’. In fact, sometimes those wheels run right off the rails! If you choose not to serve alcohol, this should be completely your choice. However, you should give people the option to BYO if they choose to.

If you’d prefer that the social waters (and you wedding videography memories) weren’t muddied by alcohol at all, you could compromise by serving only wine with dinner or by having a bar that opens relatively late.

Or, just let people know that it will be an alcohol-free event!

“It’ll be nice and intimate!”, says one.

“We’ll hurt the feelings of everyone we don’t invite!”, says the other. And so, practice for the endless negotiation and unending compromise called marriage continues!

Today we don’t offer any answers to the big vs small wedding debate, but we do help you explore some issues you might not have thought about before, in relation to things like pricing, services and wedding videography.

Big Weddings: Consider …
Big weddings are raucous, inclusive, all-day events that will hopefully leave people talking for the rest of the week! You need to think about things like:

The per person cost may be smaller
There are economies of scale to be enjoyed in larger weddings. A venue for 150 people may cost more than a venue for 50 people, but the per-head price is usually much lower. This is true of a myriad of wedding services, such as invitation printing, catering, bonbonniere, etc.

Relationship dynamics
The relationship dynamics among guests at a big wedding can be different to a small wedding – though not always in a predictable way! There is more potential for conflict … but there are also more places for guests to avoid pre-existing tensions. If you’re inviting two divorced parents or very different groups of friends for example, a large wedding could be preferable.

How will the wedding videographer capture everything that needs to be captured?
Big weddings mean lots of action. To ensure that you capture everything you want to in your wedding videography, make sure you don’t double-book any time slot!

More presents!
Nobody comes to a wedding empty-handed! If you’d prefer not to be smothered in presents, don’t have a large wedding. If you’re starting a new home and need plenty of homemaking items, this could be a side bonus!

Small Weddings: Consider…
These intimate affairs really give you the opportunity to focus on the people who matter in your life. But you need to think about:

Who to leave off the guest list?
The line must be drawn somewhere, if you want to keep your wedding small. Should you invite more close friends but not allow partners or children to come? This can create lasting tensions, not just between you but among spouses and families.

Choice of location
You have far more options of venue when your group remains small … forest weddings, beach weddings and garden weddings all make for spectacular wedding videography opportunities!

Stretch out the celebration
Plan several different small after parties with different populations of friends, keep relationships smoothed over and people in their happy place, and you also get to stretch out the celebration! You will need to decide how much of the after-parties will be captured by the wedding videography.

Cut Transitions
This transition in a wedding video is a simple, flat stopping of one shot and beginning of another shot.

It is the style used in all movies, documentaries, news reports … and most of the good wedding videos too! Just because it’s plainer than other transitions doesn’t make it inferior. In fact, we want your audience to be able to focus on what the wedding video shows, and cuts are the least distracting transition.

Fade Out-Fade In Transitions
In this transition type there is an intermediate white screen or black screen between two shots – the first one fades out, the second fades in.

This transition type is often used to mark the passage of time. The black or white screen doesn’t stay up for long – a fraction of a second – but it is enough to make a slightly more defined ‘border’ between two sections of your wedding video.

While ‘fade to white’ screens can look very stylish, they also tend to light up the room and hurt your viewers eyeballs if they are too long or watched on a big LCD screen – so we don’t use them as much.

Dissolve Transitions
A more ‘obvious’ version of the fade out-fade in transition, this is sometimes used to delineate a change of scene in a wedding video.

Page Peel and Other Fancy Transitions
These transitions have a somewhat 3D effect, and are very noticeable in the course of the wedding video! Sometimes they work well, and some people adore the big, bright theatrical atmosphere they create. We may use fancy transitions in a photo slide show incorporated into your wedding video, but 95% of transitions should really be cuts or fade out-fade in, to help the viewers focus on what’s actually happening in the video.

Your transitions are a large part of what makes up the ‘feel’ of your wedding video. You might not notice them – but that’s actually for the best!

The Joy of Elopement
Search the internet for ‘why I eloped’, or a similar phrase. You’ll find a thousand stories of wedding days that were incredibly intimate, relaxingly romantic and helped the happy couple start out on their life by being very cheap!

When you don’t have to pay for a large venues, a per-head price for meals, drinks, a band or other entertainment, you free yourself to spend your wedding budget on the things that might mean a lot more to you.

Did you compromise on your wedding dress because having a large reception meant you couldn’t afford your favourite? Did you choose to go with just photos rather than a wedding video, because wedding videographers weren’t in your budget? What about your wedding rings, your honeymoon, all the things that mean the most to the two of you? Eloping can sometimes be your ticket to a dream wedding!

Elopement Impasses
Having your friends and family at a wedding is normal. Eloping is not. There will inevitably be people who disagree with your decision. And after all, they mean well and simply want to share your joy!

If you want to elope, you can soften the blow for your family and friends by:
• Telling them what you’re doing ahead of time
• Asking if a few very close people would like to come. For example, only your parents; only your immediate families; or only immediate family and their partners.
• Holding a reception at some point afterwards so that people can help you celebrate
• Ensuring you hire a wedding videographer! A wedding video allows your guests to share in that tearfully joyous moment.
• Reminding them how much a formal wedding costs!

In the end, the choice to elope is yours – but you must also live with the reality of how other people feel about your choices! Do what you want in your heart, but make sure you soften the blow by telling people in advance, sharing around your wedding video and celebrating with your family afterwards.

Weather for Your March Wedding
March is generally a very stable time of year for weather. You avoid the gusty winds that characterise spring, the giveaway sweat stains of summer that show up in wedding videos, and maintain more freedom in your choice of wedding dress than for a winter wedding.

You’ll be free to plan to have as much or as little of your ceremony and reception indoors or outdoors as you like. Wedding video is best shot outside – but you might want to put in place a ‘Plan B’ just in case the March weather turns mad!

Food and Flowers
Your wedding dinner will be at its best with an assortment of fresh seasonal produce, and your flowers will be cheaper if they are in season! For March weddings, make sure the menu includes:
• Mackerel
• Salmon
• Oysters (the food of love!)
• Lamb
• Asparagus
• Beanshoots
• Stonefruit
• Nashi fruit
• Eggplant
• Turnip
• Zucchini

For your petals, pick blossoms from:
• Asters
• Chrysanthemums
• Canna lilies
• Persimmon blossoms
• Witch hazel
• Asterids

Dates to Avoid
There are some fairly obvious dates in March to avoid for wedding planning! Unless you want your reception and wedding video spoiled by drunken green-clothed giant leprechauns, don’t book your wedding for St Patricks Day. Additionally, some states have a labour Day holiday in mid-March, on which many of your guests may have already planned a long-weekend activity.

Make the faces shining out of your wedding video happy ones, with smart calendar-based wedding planning!

Why Is Raw Footage So Controversial?
Although raw footage doesn’t take any extra work to create, it is fraught with questions of future business opportunities, reputation and marketability.

The raw footage shot by wedding videographers is never representative of our best work. The colour hasn’t been corrected, the audio hasn’t been tweaked to help you hear the important bits, the messy parts of video haven’t been cut out, etc. In short, it looks pretty much like an amateur job … and wedding videographers want to be known for their professional video quality, not for doing the same job that Uncle Bob could have!

The Technical Difficulties
Additionally, our wedding videos are shot in professional formats that are not usually readable by home PC programs or DVD players. The size of your raw footage files will probably be over 100GB, also, meaning that it is usually only transferable via hard drive.

So … Can I Have My Raw Footage?
Some wedding videographers are happy to give this out. Some will provide the raw footage for a fee, and some will never provide raw footage, full stop.

At Instyle Videos, we appreciate that you might want to see every little thing that happened on your wedding day and was captured on camera. If you’d like this, make sure you discuss it with our team at your first appointment!

What’s All the Fuss About?
All the talk is occurring because, with the mass communication occurring on the internet, the music used in wedding videos is now visible to the copyright holders of that music. Additionally, the pressure put on music labels by the booming peer-to-peer phenomenon means that they want to make an example of those found using their music without paying for it properly.

This is completely understandable, but has created problems for some wedding videographers who were not aware of the licensing requirements for music.

What Music Can I Choose for My Wedding Video?
At Instyle Videos, you can choose whatever music you like for your wedding video. The music licensing process for any songs, popular, classical or otherwise, is taken care of through our office.

Do Some Songs Cost More Than Others?
Some songs cost slightly more than others, because the ‘royalty’ component of the music license is based on the record’s retail sales price. However, this extra cost is in the order a few dollars … not a few hundred dollars! You should feel free to choose the music you like best without worrying about the cost.

Does Licensed Music Add a Lot to the Cost of a Wedding Video?
No. It actually costs more in man hours to simply fill out the paperwork and go through the process than the cost of the license!

However, using music without a license in your wedding video could be extremely costly! One wedding videographer had to settle for a five-figure amount after using a copyrighted song in a client’s wedding video without a license.