Jo & Simon Wedding Video 2023

I attended Jo & Simon's wedding after meeting this beautiful couple at a friends house. We immediately had a great relationship with similar values and colourful senses of humour.

The video attached is a wedding video I was asked to edit from the footage and photos acquired across the 3 day 'fest'. We did have one professional cameraman for the ceremony and speeches on the main day, however, most of this was from phone footage and stills.

It's quite a challenge to edit footage you haven't directed or curated in capturing, and coming up with a creative way to present that while keeping the viewer engaged.

Jo & Simon are fans of rock music, so I told the wedding video in a story of sorts - working my way chronologically through the days and going from day to night in the sequence of footage and photos. All to instrumentals of rock hits (starting with Van Halen's 'Jump').

For the main Wedding Day section, I wanted to keep it somewhat traditional; with any shots of the bride or groom that were available, and the arrival of the bride by car. For music, I chose a string quartet cover I found online of Mealoaf's 'I Would Do Anything For Love' to keep the rock theme, but also as a quartet cover, more traditional and classy to highlight the grandiose affair.

The couples' chosen wedding song during the event was 'You're The Best Thing' by The Style Council. So for Jo's arrival, I added a piano cover of the intro, and spliced it into the original (removing the original intro and segueing the two). This was because I wanted the original song to match the timing of when it was played during Jo's walk to the beautiful flower altar.

I then decided to keep the full footage for each speech section, as the bride and groom stated they couldn't remember much of the day because of the stress and magic of the whole thing. I spent hours repairing the audio, as there was lots of background noise, like a petrol generator for the audio system, planes going overhead (popular area for skydiving), and a whole host of other audio challenges to overcome. I'm pleased with the clarity of the audio, but decided to add subtitles too to accommodate for the hard of hearing and people who struggle with accents.

The last wedfest section was a 70s disco themed day/night, so I used quick cuts, some flashy transitions, and some popular disco music (KC & The Sunshine Band's 'Give It Up'.

The final section uses a backing track for 'Wild Horses' by The Rolling Stones and tells the story of the couple finalizing the wedding paperwork, and going back to the pub they first met at (mentioned in the best man's speech).

I'm proud to say the couple were very pleased and grateful with the results, and I learned to ask at future events "who have you got making the wedding video?"