Our Process

South Asian weddings are completely different than any other wedding we film in New York. Generally, we find ourselves filming 10-12 hours for an average wedding day and our features land in around 10-15 mins long. For South Asian Weddings, it usually involves filming 2-3 days in a row. Sometimes there are multiple ceremonies and some can be as long as 3 hours.

For this wedding, we filmed about 6 hours on day 1 and about 12 hours on day 2. The main day (day 2) took place at one of the most prestigious venues in New York called Oheka Castle. One of our techniques for storytelling is to interview the bride and groom for about 15 mins during the wedding day. We usually have an idea of their backstory from pre-interview phone calls we have weeks before.

When we do the interviews, we are covering preps separately as single cam ops. During the preparations, we set up a camera on a tripod, sitting next to it the camera (closely checking focus from time to time) and asking interview questions. We try to stay at about an F/4.0 aperture to ensure there is wiggle room for focus but still getting a nice shallow depth of field. We use the Tascam DR10L lav mic system. This lav mic sounds incredible and it only retails for about $200.

Pricing

How much did we charge for this film? I get asked that question all the time.

Day One – 2 cinematographers / 6 hours

Day Two – 3 cinematographers / 12 hours

The invoice was slightly under $16,000 USD. Deliverables include this film and a trailer delivered digitally online and on a USB drive. Editing time was approx. 80 hours in total. The raw footage was not included in this package.

LED Flicker

While filming the reception on day two, we encountered a major problem with the LED lighting around the ballroom. The first thing we attempted to do was change our shutter speeds to minimize the flicker. Most times this can be very helpful but on this shoot, it did not help at all. The frequencies outputted by the LED colors create horrible flicker in many scenes. We approached the lighting design company about this but they were not able to change the lighting.

We tried different flicker filter plugins for Premiere Pro with no luck until someone introduced me to a plugin called Flicker Free from Digital Anarchy available for $149. WOW is all I can say. This plugin is incredible. Although there are still shots with flicker in the movie, I was able to minimize a lot of problems.

Tech Stuff