Which Wedding Film Package Should I Book?

One of the questions I get asked most often is which wedding-film package someone actually needs. I think there's a slightly better question to ask: what do you think you'll want to watch again in five or ten years?

Because the difference between a Highlights Film and something longer isn't really about whether you want a four-minute film or a ten-minute one. It's about what needs to be captured properly in the first place.

Most couples choose a Highlights Film

A Highlights Film is still the format most couples book with me, and for plenty of weddings, I think it's exactly the right choice. I'm filming the day with the finished film already in mind, moving around, finding different angles, looking for reactions and trying to notice the things happening away from the obvious centre of attention.

During a speech, for example, I'm not going to plant myself at the back of the room pointing one camera at the speaker for twenty minutes. I might film them for a while, move to catch the bride or groom reacting, pick up their parents, the table that's absolutely losing it at something the best man's said, a few details around the room, then come back to the speaker from somewhere else. That gives me far more to work with when I'm cutting a Highlights Film. It also means I'm filming very differently from someone whose job is to create a complete recording of that speech, and that distinction turns out to matter a lot.

A full speech has to be filmed as a full speech

Every now and again, after I've delivered a Highlights Film, I'll get an email asking whether I happen to have Dad's whole speech, or whether there's any chance of the best man's in full. Of the couples who come back asking for something extra, probably 70-80% are asking about the speeches rather than the ceremony. I get why. On the day, the speeches are just another part of an enormous day. Five years later, hearing exactly what your dad said can feel completely different.

The problem is that having footage from a speech isn't the same thing as having a recording of the speech. If I know beforehand that you want it preserved in full, I shoot it differently.

Sound is the big difference

Good wedding audio doesn't happen by accident. A camera can technically record whatever's coming into its microphone, but that's not how I'd ever choose to preserve something as important as a ceremony or a speech. The camera might be several metres away, people are moving around, there's noise from the room, and because I'm the one operating it, the mic can even pick up handling noise from me.

So if I'm recording speeches properly, there's a separate audio setup. For a ceremony, that normally means a mic on the groom alongside a dedicated recorder. For speeches, if the venue's using a handheld mic and PA system, I can attach a small recorder directly to that mic and capture the speaker at source, usually with some redundancy built in too. Then there are additional cameras running continuously, so while I can still move around and catch reactions, I always have a complete angle on whoever's speaking. Once I get home, all of those cameras and separate audio recordings have to be synced, cleaned up and edited together, which is the part you never see when you're just looking at a package on a website.

Most of the difference happens after the wedding

Adding another locked-off camera during a ceremony isn't what dramatically changes the amount of work, and neither is putting a mic on someone. It's what those things create afterwards. A Highlights Film is an intentionally condensed piece of filmmaking, where I'm going through everything I captured and choosing the moments that best tell the story of the day. If I'm weaving speeches and vows into a longer narrative film, I also have to go through all of that dialogue properly, listening for the line from Dad that sets up something later in the film, the sentence from the groom that works beautifully against a shot of his wife, a piece of a reading or a vow that suddenly gives a sequence far more meaning. Then I'm building the film around those words, which is a very different edit from cutting a wedding entirely around music. And if you're also asking for the ceremony or speeches in full, there are effectively additional films to edit, sound-mix and deliver. That's where a lot of the difference in price actually comes from.

Why I need to know before the wedding

There's another technical difference most couples would never have any reason to think about. For a lot of a wedding day I shoot at 50 frames per second, which gives me the option of slowing a shot down beautifully in the edit — for something like confetti I might even go up to 100fps. If I'm recording a complete speech or ceremony with synchronised sound, I'll generally shoot that material at 25fps instead. The number itself isn't really the point. It's that I'm making different decisions while I'm filming, because I already know what the finished film needs to be. That's why adding a complete speech after the wedding isn't always as simple as finding the files and sticking them together. Sometimes it can be done. Sometimes it can't.

I've done it the difficult way before

Sophie and Niall's wedding at Stone Barn is a good example. The original plan hadn't involved capturing their sound the way I would if I'd known from the outset I was making a narrative Extended Highlights Film. During the edit we talked about using some of their vows, and since I had scratch audio recorded by the cameras, I said I'd see what I could do. My background before filmmaking was in audio engineering and music production, which turned out to be useful there — I spent a lot of time cleaning up the recordings and managed to make them work. I'm glad I did, but it was considerably more work, and there's ultimately a limit to what you can repair when something wasn't recorded as a primary audio source in the first place.

Their friends Faye and Niall later came to me having seen that film, wanting something similar. That conversation was much easier. I could explain that if those voices mattered to the film, I needed to know before the wedding, so for their day I could capture everything properly from the start. Gillian and Adam were similar. They sent me an example of the sort of film they loved, and it was obvious straight away that spoken audio was a big part of what they were responding to. That changes my preparation before I've even shot a single frame.

Extended doesn't always mean narrative

There's another distinction worth making here. You can have a longer wedding film without building it around speech and ceremony audio. Dan and Georgina's film is a good example of that. It has more room than a standard Highlights Film, moments play for longer, there's more of the day, the edit doesn't have to compress everything quite so aggressively. But it's still fundamentally built around the pictures and the music. That's different from an Extended Highlights Film, where vows, readings and speeches are woven through as part of the narrative. Neither is better, they're just different films.

The bit couples often only realise afterwards

I've had two couples this year come back asking whether I still had the clips or rushes from their wedding, and I completely understand why. One wanted the father-of-the-bride speech from a wedding I'd filmed three or four years earlier. The original booking had only been for a standard Highlights Film, so I hadn't filmed the speech as a continuous finished piece — I'd shot it the way I needed to for the Highlights Film, moving around the room, finding different angles, picking up reactions and taking the pieces I knew I could use in the final edit.

I was able to go back into the archive and find material for them, but that doesn't mean I can just drag a file onto a hard drive and send it over. Raw footage is exactly that, raw. If I hand something over properly it usually needs colour work, sound cleanup, syncing and some basic editing first, and I have to manage expectations too. If I wasn't intentionally recording a speech in full, there may be camera movement, or sections where I've moved away from the speaker entirely to catch someone else's reaction. The sound almost certainly won't be as clean as it would've been with dedicated mics and recorders placed around the room. Sometimes I can rescue something really meaningful. But rescue is the right word for it. It isn't the same as having planned to preserve it properly in the first place.

I don't keep rushes forever

There's a practical side to this too. Wedding footage takes up a huge amount of storage, and the cost of keeping tens of terabytes of camera originals indefinitely isn't insignificant. My current archive policy is to keep the original footage from a wedding for five years, after which I may delete the raw files associated with the project. The finished films are a different matter, but the hundreds or thousands of individual camera clips that went into making them aren't something I can guarantee will exist forever. So if there's something you're fairly sure you'll want, your dad's speech, the vows, the full ceremony, it's much better to decide that before the wedding than to hope the footage happens to still exist years later.

There are more options than simply choosing the biggest package

This is probably the most important thing to take from all of this. You don't necessarily need to jump from a standard Highlights Film straight to the largest package I offer. I can tailor things. You might want a Highlights Film but also want the speeches recorded and delivered separately in full. You might want the complete ceremony alongside a shorter Highlights Film. You might want an Extended Highlights Film where longer sections of the vows and speeches run through the story. Or you might only care about one particular thing, I've even been asked to just make sure the speeches were captured in full while the rest of the wedding was filmed in my normal Highlights style. All of that's possible. I just need to know.

So which package should you choose?

If what you want is a beautifully made film that takes you back to the feeling of the wedding, a Highlights Film may genuinely be all you need. It's the format I shoot most often and I love making them. If you want a bit more room, more of the reception, more of the people, longer sequences and a less compressed version of the day, an Extended Highlights Film can give you that without necessarily needing complete ceremony and speech coverage.

But if you hear somebody's vows running through a wedding film on my site and think, that's what I want, tell me. If you know your dad's writing a speech and there's even a small part of you that thinks you might want to hear the whole thing again one day, tell me. If the words matter, we need to record the words properly.

The question I'd ask before booking

You don't necessarily know before the wedding which moments are going to matter more as time passes. That's probably the hardest part of choosing a package, and I'm certainly not going to tell everybody they need everything recorded start to finish. Most couples don't.

But before you book, I'd ask yourself one question: if I could sit down in ten years and watch one part of my wedding exactly as it happened, what would it be? If the answer is your dad's speech, your partner's vows, the best man's speech or the ceremony itself, tell me. We can build the package around that. Because I can always take a full recording and use a small part of it in a Highlights Film. What I can't always do is go back three, four or five years later and recreate something that was never recorded in full.

If any of this sounds like what you want, take a look at the wedding-film packages or get in touch and we can talk through what's right for your day.