The best wedding videos are all about emotion

How much advance planning is there for a wedding? 

I usually book my weddings six months in advance and pre-production is really important. I run through the timeline of the wedding as I need to know all the details that are going to happen beforehand. But I don’t visit the venue beforehand, because I think that when you arrive for the first time to a place it generates a special emotional component that makes it even more important when it comes to doing a shoot. For me it generates a lot of excitement.

I never think about what the wedding video will be like. I prefer to leave my mind free and let myself go at the event, put my five senses into everything that happens there and create the story itself that day and later in the editing.

What are you looking for during the wedding. Shots outside of the plan?

I look for a vision as if I were the father of the bride or the groom’s best friend. I always want to feel like them and feel those emotions that they experience. So I look for a balance between emotions, elegance, sensuality, photography and light, as well as the wildest side of a wedding!

How do you want to make people feel when they watch your work?

Above all, I want them to feel identified. Something that characterises me is that each wedding video is unique – it is really focused on those couples. The wedding of the bride and groom who get married in Guatemala next to a coffee plantation has nothing to do with a couple who are getting married on a lost island in a remote part of the world. Each wedding must be unique for me. I try to make them feel important vibrations in their emotional system and I play a lot with techniques to achieve truly special results for my couples.

What tips would you have for amateurs who might want to take video at a friend’s wedding?

At a wedding, there are emotions that will never happen again in your life, so the most important thing is to go in search of emotion. Beautiful images of the couple are great, but really what will make your job unique is to have the bride’s grandmother hugging her when she walks down the aisle or to have the tears of the father watching his daughter during the ceremony. We are making memories, and at weddings many once-in-a-lifetime moments occur.

The Z9 is perfect for a wedding where there are many hours of recording, many types of adverse weather and many different moments to record. But any Nikon mirrorless camera will do well for you. If I had to have only one lens, it would be the NIKKOR Z 50mm f/1.2 S. If budget doesn’t allow, though, the NIKKOR Z 40mm f/2 SE is perfect.

What’s in the kitbag?

As a main body I carry a Nikon Z9 and as an auxiliary body in the suitcase I carry a Nikon Z8. I like to work alone and give my vision from beginning to end and generate that more artistic point, so I have developed my own recording system to work only with one camera, although I always carry two bodies.

Favourite lenses in my case are the NIKKOR Z 135mm f/1.8 S Plena, which I love, the NIKKOR Z 50mm f/1.2 S, which is usually for portraits and places with low light, and the NIKKOR Z 40mm f/2 SE, which is a great, compact all-rounder. I like it on manual focus and its sharpness is fantastic. It allows me to get into difficult corners and move quickly.

The NIKKOR Z 20mm f/1.8 S is another essential. I usually use this angle to give a sense of magnitude, for example, in a chapel that has a large vault or a grand entrance. I often combine the Z8 and NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S on a tripod for speeches or moments in the ceremony.

I also have wireless sound systems to synchronise them with my cameras, shotgun microphones, some small drones and all kinds of gadgets and systems to connect or fix problems quickly.

I usually carry two spare batteries for the Z9, although often I use a whole one and maybe a bit of another battery, and I also usually carry three Z8 batteries. I have the tripod to use on rare occasions, such as speeches and ceremonies, and I carry all this in a suitcase with wheels.

Do you shoot with the camera in a cage?

I don’t usually use a cage. I want to try to feel like a photographer. I want to be stealthy, and stay very unnoticed, so I go almost like a photographer, and sometimes I carry a small microphone.

My vision is really that I am a cinematographer who feels like a photographer. My videos are still photos that have some movement and tell a story. For me, the most important thing is to go light and be able to put myself in the best places at all times.

If you are also working with a stills photographer at a wedding, how does that work?

Every day I work with a different photographer in a totally different part of the world. Sometimes it’s complicated, because each one does things in a different way, but I like to think of us as a team. I think this is really important, because in the end the work of the photographer and mine as a filmmaker must go hand in hand. We both want the best result for our clients, so the best thing is to coordinate, leave egos aside and work for the couple. It’s a very long day, very tense sometimes, but you have to keep your feet on the ground and just think about the clients.

How much footage would you generate in an average wedding?

I record about 300-500GB per wedding! It’s really incredible, but this happens because I record in high quality. I use high bit rates a lot, and high fps and in 4K or 8K. This allows me to do what I want in editing, so it’s worth it for all those GB!

How intensive is the editing process?

I use Final Cut Pro and, normally, editing a wedding takes about three weeks. It involves ten to 12 hours of recording (or even several days of events – this happens a lot nowadays) and this makes it a long process. You have to review all the material in its entirety and start shaping it to make a film of about ten to 15 minutes and a trailer of about one to three minutes. Visually everything looks great, but I’m always searching for the emotion.

I always start by making the film and then I make the trailer. For me, the sound is super important – the ambient sound of the wedding and all the sound of that day, so you have to combine sound, images and music well to generate a narrative and a great memory for life. It’s a really exciting job, starting with an empty timeline in the editor and beginning to shape it. It’s like building a house from scratch. You have to have a good structure before you start decorating.