Why did I choose to become a wedding videographer?

First up, I am a wedding videographer and I have to say that I have never had a job as an adult that didn’t involve video and film. That’s because I decided at school that I wasn’t going to make a career doing what I hated or sit in a room waiting for the clock to hit five. No sir! In those days, I had never heard of a wedding videographer, no one was filming weddings, it wasn’t even a thought in my mind but I was thinking about film.

Life can take you on it’s course and sometimes, without you even knowing, it can push you in another direction and that’s kind of what happened to me. You wake up one morning and think…how did that all happen??

I initially wanted to become a graphic designer and went to University of Tasmania, Australia to study that but they also had a film-making department there so after I had finished my foundation year, I switched to film and never looked back. One day, I had to find one of the lecturers and inadvertently found myself in one of the far recesses of the uni campus where I discovered….a fully equipped state of the art television studio. Incredible! Why didn’t I or any of my peers know about this? Well, that’s because the TV aspect of it, or ‘video’ as it tended to be called wasn’t listed as a course as such and therefore, wasn’t promoted in any way. What to do?

Long story short, I found such a way by involving television production as part of my film-making and, as the only student in that first year, that freed me up to spend countless hundreds of hours over three years doing what I now absolutely loved. Primarily, I wanted to make music videos and did so. I would hide in a very cramped knee high cupboard in the studio edit suite at five o’clock, just before locking-up time. Once the security guy had bolted the door, I would wait for his footsteps to fade away and knowing he was gone, out I’d come and turn all the edit machines back on and there I’d stay until 6am, editing away to my heart’s content. Time meant nothing, in fact, there wasn’t anywhere near enough of it. I did that nightly, Monday to Friday, for two years.

One night, as I was in the cupboard, I heard the door open and in came my video lecturer, Leigh and his girlfriend to do some editing. I was stuck! What should I do? Should I sit still and stay hidden while he does his work, they could be hours and me bent double inside a box in the dark! What if I suffocate? What if they get up to something naughty? That truly had to be the worst scenario.

I was in a dilemma, for sure and as nice a guy as Leigh was, I wasn’t going to risk everything by leaping out of my box and giving them both a shock into the bargain. I’d be out, no degree and three years for nothing. Well, seconds later, they packed up and went, thank God, sparing me either suffocation or expellation. (I don’t think that’s a word, somehow but it will do, it rhymes and that’s a good thing.) Next day, who should I bump into but Leigh, my lecturer. He gave me a wink and asked me if I enjoy hiding in that cupboard on a nightly basis. How….how on earth did he know? He was cool about it and understood. Lucky for me!

During the day, other students would book time in the suite as by now, it had caught on and I wasn’t getting the time I wanted so I figured that I had to work at night and came up with the above plan. Had I been caught, who knows what may have happened. Yes, I know how it feels to suffer for your art!

I finished my degree course and managed to land myself a job as a lighting cameraman at the local TV station in Tasmania and after two years, I transferred to Perth to work at one of the big national networks, Channel 7, filming the America’s Cup yacht race and also News. Life was good.

I then worked for Curtin University in Perth making health related films for all the Australian hospitals for three years. After that, I went to work for Imax, the mega large screen cinema company. I then met my wife who lived in Kent in England and twelve years ago, I decided to move here and went looking for a new adventure. See, I understand why a man will uproot everything and go to live on the other side of the world for the woman he loves, I really do, I’ve done it. I didn’t even see a wedding videographer at my wedding ten years ago, I couldn’t exactly film the day myself, not really although the thought did cross my mind.

Apart from making some commercial films, I was still looking for something new to do with film-making.

One day, a friend of a friend asked me if I would film their wedding and bingo…that was it. I was now a wedding videographer and I’ve been filming weddings ever since. Weddings fulfill that missing chapter in my life, I just love creating something out of nothing that has the ability to make a newly wedded couple so very happy. That’s why I started up East Kent Wedding Video.

All the experience I have gathered over the years has brought me to this place in time and it’s something I will always do because I really do get as much joy out of the finished production as the happy couple themselves do…..and that’s the truth. I always say that no two weddings are ever the same for me, I treat each one as if it’s the first and it doesn’t leave my studio until I am happy with it. I look at it this way; I try to imagine myself on the bride and groom’s couch in their home watching it for the first time, just like they would, and I want to feel that, yes, that was their wedding day and there really is no more that I could have filmed to make that film any better. Then, and only then, does an East Kent Wedding Video DVD leave me.

I said at the start that life can take you on a course, often without knowing where it will lead but I’m happy where it has led me to and the value of the previous years since school where I learned my craft. You can’t ask for more than that.

Chris, (most definitely a wedding videographer)
East Kent Wedding Video