Wedding Videos: How to Hire a Wedding Videographer.

Most brides spend months, if not years, dreaming about their wedding day – visualizing an event that will be as unique and sparkling as a snowflake, dazzingly unlike any wedding before or yet to come, utterly fresh and magical. They may invest hours upon hours searching for the perfect wedding ring.

Yet, when those brides look for a wedding videographer -- to capture a living record of that remarkable day, a video which will be viewed for as long as they’re looking at their wedding rings (even if not as often) – most brides follow a very predictable pattern:

- They lump their search for a videographer along with shopping for other vendors, such as caterers, florists, and limousine companies.
- They wait until after choosing a photographer before locating a videographer.
- They give little thought to what they want their wedding video to actually be like; they just want to know it will be done.
- They make their final choice by price.

There is an old axiom in entrepreneurial circles: “Observe the masses – then do the opposite.” That also is good advice for any bride who wants a quality video of her wedding day. Hiring a videographer isn’t just a matter of ticking off a check box somewhere on the prenuptial To Do list. For that matter, settling on the lowest bidder is no formula for securing a video that enthralls generations of viewers.

I will admit to a bias here, as a partner in a videography company that competes on quality, not on price. But statistics support the belief that brides who treat videography as a commodity often regret that view later.

LESSONS LEARNED

The Wedding and Event Videographers Association (WEVA), an international professional group founded in the 1980s, commissioned a 2005 nationwide study to look at brides’ attitudes about videography both before and after their weddings. The brides were asked to rank videography on a personal “Top 10” list of wedding priorities.

Prior to their weddings, barely 50% of the brides listed videography as a Top 10 item. However, after the weddings the emphasis changed dramatically. A whopping 79% of the brides placed videography among their Top 10 items for wedding planning.

I would bet that a follow-up survey, checking with brides a year or more after their weddings, would show the percentages climbing even higher. Here’s why: Your video (and your photographs), unlike the contributions of other vendors, are the “to have and to hold” parts of your wedding celebration. They endure -- long after the bouquets have withered, the top of the cake has been taken out of the freezer and shared at an anniversary dinner, and you have forgotten whether the Mikasa platter was a gift from Aunt Sally or Cousin George.