Something for Geeky Grooms & Brides…

I am excited to share with you what we do as techno-art-geeks.

 How we are devoting to the technologies to express our art. 

 Do's and Don'ts of this world and anything else which comes to mind techno related.

 This section is built because I learned how much grooms - your future hubby! - like and are excited about the subject.

So here we go…

Techie aspects of our work to excite your future hubby

All industries have trends. The wedding photography and videography industries are one of the craziest. The rate of techno-changes is staggeringly fast.

Many techs appear and look promising but need to execute reliably or add an edge to the tricky art of wedding photos and video and die in a few years.

I can't tell you how much gadgetry I have sitting in my studio collecting dust:

Pico dollies,

gorillapods,

tiny cameras,

a couple of previous generations of aerial with BAD gimbals and sensitivity to light,

some very promising but BAD lens adaptors,

portable cranes,

mini sliders,

fast strobes,

spinning tables,

steadicam gear … the list can go on.

On the other hand, to excite from a tech point of view becomes harder and harder.

Mobile tech takes over the world and, truth be told, delivers increasingly excellent quality photos and video. That definitely changes the landscape of wedding photos and videos.

I can't tell you how amazed I was to see this level of stabilization of the iPhone 6 when it came out. I just bought a new Steadicam for 2500USD, and the small iPhone 6 delivered visually about the same quality of stabilization in full HD - 1920x1080 quality!

Today I encourage my couples to send me sound clips taken by their guests and family, and I figure out ways to add these cell phone videos to their feature films.

I even had a case when one of my couples added cell phone-taken pictures to their final album.

Tech makes us all co-creators, and it can't stop amazing me!

Tech-affected changes do not stop here. How about selfie sticks, small GoPro-like cameras hidden in the bridal bouquets to have a unique vantage point, portable photobooths business that literally became a separate stream of businesses! Geeky grooms – I can assure you that you are in for an exhilarating ride!

A lot of wedding videographers would be frustrated with the fact that tech empowers people, making them less and less competitive. I am happy with all these changes as I am not selling tech per se.

What stood the test of time for me is that building a compelling story in video or pictures still requires many storytelling skills.

And this is a hard to master skill. It takes years to perfect.

There are different tools nowadays to help you to build a good, compelling story.

I spoke about many of them on my GLG Star Media Productions Facebook business page.
Take a look if you are curious.

Regardless of any new tech that comes on the market, the main question is how this new technology can help us deliver emotion? How this new tech can make the emotional impact even more precise, how can it help us to uncover the feelings that were there but invisible to the busy eyes of the guests and family?

Why do you think I have all those above gadgets sitting and collecting dust?

Some of them are not as good as devices, but some deliver rather brutal results for my eye.

So I abandoned them.

Let me speak now about tech things that excite us and our couples.

The hidden truth about the tech we use.

The absolute winners on the scale of grooms' excitement are our Aerial shots and the equipment we use to shoot moving vehicles!

Here I will lift the veil on a lot of skills & shots we bring on your wedding day that is highly tech-based.

4k Aerial Photos and Video.

Pun intended: there is no doubt how much "air" aerial shots overlaid with music bring to the feel of your album or your wedding video. 

We were the first in Montreal to add aerials to the wedding video. 

We have been flying it since the winter of 2013, much before others did. 

It was a straightforward extension of our skills since our RC experiences started in the 80s. 

You are guaranteed to excite your precious half if you still need to do it at our Demo Reel on the front page. 

Drones were less stable back in 2013-2014. We crash one right at Saint Joseph Love Story shooting

We changed another 2 aerial solutions since that time. 

Aerials unlocked shots previously wholly impossible. 

I remember we played with mounting a camera on a very long wire to fake some aerial-like shots. We had to figure out ways to hook this wire to the walls or trees to have shots that aerial can easily do now.

Aerial allowed us to get stunning views of Montreal's famous milestone places, architecture, and churches in a way we could not even imagine:  

Today's aerial technology is much more advanced! 

With 3-axis camera stabilization, 5km wireless range, HD remote view, Dual GPS networks, and advanced safety features, the aerial camera is so stable that it looks like a tripod hanging in midair. It is so stable that we can take nighttime multi-second long exposures photographs, which is unheard of. 

Click above on Play to see just how stable, stable can be… Note the video above is not an animation; it is not stabilized in post-production or altered in any other way. This is actually what is possible with pure drone videography today! And we can Live to Stream it as well!

Amazing, isn't it? 

 3axis Brushless camera stabilizer

To really appreciate what the 3axis Brushless camera stabilizer allowed us to do, I will have to give you an idea about the first Steadicam we purchased in 2008 – the famous Steadicam Merlin with arm & vest.

At the time, it was a great piece of "machinery": fast, reliable, and easy to balance (after a steep learning curve ;-). It worked great with my Sony XD CAM EX1, which at the time was still regarded as a camera of the future ;-)

Merlin required developing a feel for "the sweet spot" when all the lower and forward weights, side-to-side and for-and-aft trim rollers, and controlled upper/lower spar angle would finally come to a harmonic balanced state! That took me months ;-) AND once I mastered shooting with it was fast and enjoyable…

BUT!!!

The system was mechanical and controlled by hand. We could not shoot in a windy situation and were limited in many shots. Up-and-down shots could have been coming up better. 

I was not happy with them. 

At least I could not master them to the level that I would be able to convey some true romantic build-up. In this particular direction, tech stands in the way and not helping; it needs to be more mature. 

We also tried: glidecams, some DIY steady solutions, and then Brushless solutions hit the street!!! That was revolutionary. We went to Ronin-m (the big one), then mainly switched to Zhiyun, and finally to DJI Ronin-S. 

3axis Brushless camera stabilizers became our favorite Steadicam replacement because it's not affected by wind; we could hang them out of cars to follow limos/carriages, we could do boom shots, spinning shots of building tops, and a lot is possible. 

Because the gimbal in this new era of stabilizers is like a mini-computer balancing the system, the 3axis Brushless camera stabilizer allowed us to create some crazy shots unheard of before. 

I can even start the shot and, in the middle of it, give the camera to my partner, and he will continue shooting it, and none of these moves will be seen in the actual video footage. 

Shocking and amazing!!! 

5axis 4k stabilized cameras

Now, if "5axis 4k stabilized cameras" sounds too cryptic for you, I assure you it is not, and you will understand why I jumped on this tech as soon as it hit the market.

In short, 5axis stabilization allows you to get stable shots even if you hold the camera in your shaky hands ;-)

Here is more about why I WANTED it to the core!

Relatively early in my wedding shooting career, I realized that I am in love with capturing moments. You know, your eyes gleamed for a moment when you looked at your beautiful niece dressed as the flower girl; you became emotional regardless of all your attempts not to tear up while reading a letter from him/her; you showed the tongue to your maid of honor/best man, your dog gave you "that" look – these are all moments, good memorable moments!

But these authentic moments are really fleeting; they disappear fast with no chance to get them back. I can technically ask you to redo something like a ring exchange. That can work all right, but the genuine laughter, smile, tears, and a warm hug from mom or dad seeing you in your dress/wedding tux for the first time – this can't be redone, trust me. It will always look fake. To my sensitive eye, at least!

So, on one side, I have to deal with fast fleeing moments, and on the other hand, shooting video, I really need footage to be stable. In action movies or thrillers, you can have as much shake as you want. It can even be a storytelling method, but it only works in wedding movies. At weddings, everything has to be as smooth and flowie as it gets.

So in the case of the video, you have no choice but to use some sort of stabilization: Steadicam, monopod, tripod, sliders, different dollies, and other types of support.

The problem with all the stabilizers: IT TAKES TIME to readjust them before you can start shooting. And by the time you are done readjusting stabilization, the moment has long been GONE!!! 

 I need to find out how many different things I tried. I even came up with an idea of my own monopod that I tried to bring to the market. I exposed this idea to a couple of people who were very skeptical and told me that it would unlikely be a good piece of technology, but then a little-known company Neo-Tec actually created it, which felt almost like "behind my back" ;-) 

 And I still use it, thanking them and slightly cursing myself for not finding resources to push it harder at the time ( Neo-Tec was bought by Manfrotto a few years ago, but you will rarely see anyone using this monopod – and I do think it is the most convenient one for weddings, strange ah? ). Great minds think alike ;-)  

The whole thing gets even more complicated once you understand that to deliver a moment in a video, I have to have at least 3 shots from 3 different angles or just 3 somehow various but related shots. Otherwise, the idea will not be "cinematically" delivered to a viewer.

In pictures, you can get away with just one shot.

Shooting video for weddings or events, in general, has to be fast, but all these stabilization problems slow you down quite a bit.

Anyway, at one point, 5-axis stabilization for lens and 4k cameras became decent, and I switched almost entirely to shooting handheld, replacing my 2-axis 4k lens stabilized systems.

Handheld requires a good amount of brute physical forth, but I like the result, and the efforts are justified enough for me. The amount of moments I can shoot this way is overwhelming for a wedding, and I came to the point that today I am happy with both the style and the outcome.

Advanced computerized tracking sliders

Sliders became a huge hit in wedding videos a long time ago. 

As they were called before the DSLR revolution, motorized dollies were bulky and expensive. 

Their size and logistics were the main stoppers for me at the time. 

Imagine working with a heavy slider that you can not achieve a stable solution by placing it on just one large tripod? You had to have (and carry) two. Otherwise, the slider will lean on one side as soon as the camera moves off-center for more than 10cm. 

I had this problem shooting with rented equipment in Los Angeles. They simply did not have a small DSLR-geared solution to rent me then, so I had to take the big, bulky one. 

I don't remember those parts of my shooting day, as you can imagine. 

Over the years, I tried many manual and motorized solutions before we came to the advanced computerized tracking slider. This slider is controlled through the smartphone app and allows for not only the regular, smooth micro slides that I am so much in love with but also parallax, macro slides, vertical slides, timelapse slides, stop motion, and some special effects with multiple characters that we don't use in the situation of the wedding as it is too time-consuming to set up or execute.

Advanced sound technologies

Something you may not think about before: give me a crappy camera, but a state-of-the-art sound, and I will shoot and develop a great movie for you.

Sound is everything for the movie. That's why we pay an enormous amount of attention to it.

We cannot afford to have bad sound for speeches and vows, for letters from each other that you read in the morning or for the first look if we decide to shoot it.

All these moments in the fast-paced environment of the wedding day require a different sound solution to get delivered within a Feature Film. One sound solution just can't cover it. I wish there would be a universal solution.

We spent hours in churches learning how to tap (or hack, actually!) into their sound systems. Considering how many years we have been shooting weddings, we know pretty much all of them in Montreal and surrounding areas and don't have to scout the sound situation in advance as we had to do for years before.

For the first look and other important moments where we really have a super portable solution, we custom ordered the microphones that deliver HD sound but have a size of a match head and allow us to get high-quality audio almost invisibly. Guess how many times I was called "Russian KGB guy"? ;-)

The story of how we got those tiny HD microphones was interesting.

The small HD microphones did exist, but their jack was hugely unreliable for the situations we wanted to use them for as we needed to hide them on the bride's or groom's body and had to reliably leave them there unmonitored but sure that they do their jobs!

So we contacted the manufacturer and asked them to custom build 5 microphones for us: to take the jacks from their other product line and to switch them with the existing ones – to our great surprise, they did it and did it at a reasonable price for us!

Sometimes you just have to ask!!

Future techs that we are really amazed to see and have

Life definitely does not stop here, and a lot more is coming on the market that I can't wait to bring to your wedding day. 

One of the technologies that I have been watching since ~2010 is notoriously known as Light-field or Plenoptics cameras. 

These cameras allow to change the focal distance and depth of field AFTER a photo is taken and switch IN POST-PRODUCTION between near focus, far focus, or full depth of field where everything will look in focus (often useful for large group portraits on the wedding day, some portion of dances). 

Some experimental cameras like this hit the market a few years ago but were only for photography and were not particularly useful for weddings, so I tried but did not invest in them. 

As far as I know, there is yet to be a viable commercial video solution in that direction, but one day I am sure we will enjoy this technology in weddings as well. I can't wait. 

Shooting wedding is a huge adventure for me that is still unfolding. I am sure you will have a blast with us on the wedding day, and watching and re-watching your wedding movie and the album will allow you to re-live the day! 

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