Busy season is already starting to wind down up here. I had this weekend off myself. I can't complain, it was the first weekend off in an almost straight 6 months, so I finally got to do a few home projects, like attacking the 4' tall man-eating weeds that had taken over our back yard. I even got a little time to tinker on my old Studebaker, though not enough time to get anything useful done!
To stay a little bit on-subject, last week's wedding was great. So was the rehearsal. The reception on the other hand, not so much. I made mention of this on another board I frequent, but I was taping in a reception hall I had never been to before, and my reception gave me issues.
Normally, It's pretty easy to "wing it" in an unfamiliar hall. They're all mostly similar: Square or square-ish room, dance floor, sometimes a stage, bad lighting, etc. You know, the usual.
Well, this particular hall was the hall from hell. The room was the first problem. The hall was something like 20' by 65' or thereabouts, and set up the long way, like so:
Here's how I put it on the other site:
"First of all, the place was long and narrow. The room was probably 20' wide, and 60' long. But if you think shooting video in a glorified hallway is bad, it gets worse. They literally had the tables so close together that you could barely navigate through them. Some of them you couldn't, and you had to weave and bob around to get places. Not fun when you're trying to make it to the front for a quick shot. And if there needed to be icing on the cake 'o' doom, the house had this really loud background music that drowned out every speaker that came up!
But what really bugged me was that because of the tight quarters, there of course was no room for our tripods, so everything was either from our monopod, or handheld. This in itself isn't so big a deal. I'm steady as a rock on handheld, and my wife is pretty good when she's got a monopod to assist her. But the room was so full that we were CONTINUALLY being bumped and pushed as people were trying to get through.
So the end result? Well, on their finished wedding video, the reception is nothing but bouncy, shaking shots, loud music drowning out the toasts, and an all-over product that I'm not happy with. "
We usually ask the bride and groom to reserve some table space for us, "as close to the front as possible". This way, if the room is totally packed, there should theoretically be an empty spot to stand in near the front of the room for us. Well, they must have misheard us, or the room was so small they couldn't find a way to make it work, but the spot they reserved for both us and the photographer was the farthest back table, behind this half-wall thing that obstructed view. Because the room was so crowded, we wound up spending most of the reception back there, as it took an act of congress to get through the too-close tables and the hordes of people standing and milling around.
Another thing that was a little hard to keep up with was that this family is very spontaneous and loose that they didn't really have a schedule. So seemingly out of nowhere, while we're standing in the back of the room waiting for people to finish eating, The Best man stands up and starts his speech, literally without any notice. I was fortunate enough to have a camera going anyway, so I just turned it to him as quickly as I could.
Of course, we hadn't wired up the BM and MoH for audio yet, because not 5 minutes earlier I asked if we could, and they told me that they wouldn't be giving the toasts "for quite a while yet". And so we just had to live with the audio from the onboard mics, which is bad enough on it's own. But to add to that, there was no DJ, so the hall was piping jazz music through their own speakers at a ridiculously high level. This level was maintained throughout the speeches.
Overall, everything bu the reception turned out wonderfully, and as far as the reception, well, I'm honestly torn between feeling like it was their fault for having such poor conditions, and my fault for not thinking to investigate more into an unfamiliar hall. That's what you get for assuming though.
