(It seems I've skipped a couple of weddings - sorry!)
Vietnamese Wedding CeremonyIt was a last-minute gig. With only a week before the big date, we booked a ?Gold Plan? through our website. The accompanying message said this would be a Vietnamese wedding held at the bride?s home with the reception at an Asian restaurant.
We telephoned for more information and with difficulty, due to thick accents and a language barrier, learned there would not be a rehearsal, but that the bride?s home was ?very large? and there would be plenty of room for our gear and the photographer?s.
We met with the couple on Friday evening at the bride?s home so we could check everything out and learn where people would be standing, etc.
What a shock! The ?very large? living room was about the size of my editing office. Quite nice for editing, but on the smallish size for a living room. Very smallish for a living room where the couple planed to pack twenty family members, two videographers and a photographer. I told them it just would not work, but the groom assured me that his Vietnamese family did not have six-foot-two frames like I do. He agreed they would remove the couch, love seat, coffee table and a large artificial plant. He also agreed to drape something over the sixty-inch tv screen that would be facing the cameras.
I talked with him about needing some cooperation from the photographer who should keep his camera(s) back on line with ours to prevent inserting himself into the video. Again, the groom agreed.
We were to begin shooting 11:30am at the groom?s hotel lobby to capture the groom and his family coming down the elegant stairway, entering the limo and departing for the bride?s house. The limo was to take an extra fifteen minutes before arriving, to give us time to setup cameras and microphones.
Wedding Day
I had made the mistake of indulging in fast food last night and was paying a heavy price this morning. With serious concerns about whether I?d be able to make it through the day, we arrived at the hotel at 11:15, but there was absolutely no place to park. After twenty minutes of circling, vulture-like, for a parking space that never materialized, I began negotiating with the valet people. ?No, I am not leaving the key to my car with anyone ? I don?t care if your name is Michael Chertoff!?. We got a choice parking spot right in front of the hotel when the head of valet staff moved some traffic cones and had an employee drive off an old pickup truck that was taking the space.
By 11:45, I was getting my exteriors while Jean went inside to shoot the lobby. Groom and family are due to come down the stairs at 12:15. At 12:35, after standing in our positions past the foot of the stairway for twenty minutes, I call the groom and ask him to give us two minutes notice before coming down, so we could sit down. At one o?clock the groom called to say they?d be down in ten minutes. I was unable to penetrate the language/accent barrier enough to hold fast to my ?two minute? request, yet by now I knew that ten minutes had little meaning to these people.
At 1:20, they gathered at the top of the stairs and we shot their slow, deliberate descent, colorfully dressed and carrying gifts. Instead of continuing through the doors to the limo as planned (Jean and I had worked out a leapfrog plan to cover this), they stopped halfway to the door and lined up as for a posed photograph. There was little we could do but shoot this, as they obviously expected us to.
I think they were waiting for flashes to go off because several minutes passed and I finally asked them if there were anything else they?d like us to do before they exited and got into the limo. When they understood that we were ?done? they finally headed for the limo. One of the family members was wheelchair bound and apparently this caused some logistical issues that had not been preplanned.
I waited about ten minutes to shoot the limo?s departure, then walked up to the driver and asked what the status was. One of the wedding party had to go re-park the van that had held the wheelchair and this was expected to take another fifteen minutes. I decided this was just the time we needed to setup for the ceremony and told Jean we would skip the limo departure shot.
We drove straight to the house ? well, OK we made a quick stop at McDonalds for a last restroom stop, but the limo was only two minutes behind us!
Imagine our surprise to find the living room setup was nothing like the drawing I?d had the groom make the night before. No furniture had been removed and the photographer had positioned himself and his tripod right in front of everything ? in basically the only viewing path!
As if that wasn?t bad enough, he also setup two big umbrella lights on stands, one blocking our view and the other in front of some of the wedding party. There was little we could do but hurriedly setup our gear, mic the groom and do the best we could under the circumstances.
I've apparently drawn the living room longer than it was because all that clear space in front just wasn't there. "Lt" is the photographers umbrella lights; blue circle is the photographer (who stood, thus placing his filthy ballcap in our C3 shot).
C3 is a static VX2100 on a 7 1/2 foot tripod with a wide-angle lens. C1 is Jean's VX2100 on a tripod, following the action as best she could. C2 is my shoulder-mounted VX2100, again I'm following the action as best I can.
We had two other cameras - a C7 and an FX1 but there was just no place to setup another camera.
There are numerous people talking to the couple, one at a time as part of the ceremony, but there are also people not paying attention and having their own discussions, children playing, women cooking in the next room and various distractions.
There were too may people to mic and a mic on a stand wasn't practical due to the fact that people would not all be coming forward to speak. I was afraid that a handheld mic would become a distraction in itself and most people don't know how to handle one. Since we would not be able to coax them, and since the room was small - and especially since the groom assured me that everyone would be very quiet except for those who were supposed to speak - I decided that a single lav on the groom and shotgun mic on C3 and C1 would be sufficient. A decision I now regret.
During part of the ceremony, those up front turned and faced the shelves and did a little ceremonial thing with incense. I had to shoot through the plant that had not been removed in order to get even a glimpse of faces.
At various times throughout the ceremony, the photographer would interrupt everything to have people pose for a photo. One would have thought he'd never heard of flash or that he was using a camera from the 1800's that needed a full-second exposure time.
After the ceremony, everyone ate and we had about an hour to kill, sitting outside. The Vietnamese photographer, a trim, military-looking fellow in his forties who was dressed well except for the filthy, well-worn baseball cap on his head, came out and chatted with us. He said that his company did wedding videos as well as photography and they had three teams out shooting weddings on this very day and that they stay booked three years in advance. (I?m pretty aware of the videographers in this area and none of this seemed credible to me.)
He went on to say that Vietnamese were used to ?professional? video cameras and they would laugh at our tiny VX2100s since ?Vietnamese wedding videographers use ? inch CCD cameras.? He continued saying that he'd caught a glance at our LCDs and our white balance was off - "You pictures all blue, video no good!". This was hilarious considering that at no time was he in a position to catch a glance at any of our LCDs; his lights were not daylight temperature; and finally, we wouldn't make such an amateurish mistake.
This fellow obviously felt threatened by us, so I did my best to put him at ease and be friendly.
Finally we were able to shoot the limo exit and head out to the restaurant, arriving around four o?clock.
This is getting long, so I?ll post the reception part separately..
http://www.weddingvideodoneright.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=416
