Elton John’s stag do, Romeo Beckham’s christening, Poppy Delevingne’s wedding, Gary Player’s 80th birthday bash: the film-maker Andrew Gemmell has shot more celebrity get-togethers than you can shake a tripod at.

Star-studded but privately commissioned, they’re films that most of us will never see. But Gemmell, who is based in the UK, has detected a new trend among his well-heeled clients: well-off families are not only taking au pairs and nannies away on holiday, a growing number are bringing a personal film-maker along too.

It’s a tricky brief. Gemmell says he has to be available 24/7 to capture the real-life moments. “We just fit in with whatever they’re doing – we don’t ask people to perform in front of the cameras.”

He believes the new demand is a result of video having become much more important in people’s lives, thanks to social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram.

“They want content that’s relevant to them,” he says. “So they’re thinking: ‘well, if I’m gong to spend a week away with my mates or my family, then let’s get it properly documented.’”

This year Gemmell has packed his drones, lights and cameras and flown with clients to destinations such as Sicily, Corfu and the Masai Mara reserve in Kenya. “I love travelling,” he says. “I’ll go anywhere.”

Emilia Whitfield had used Gemmell as the official videographer at her wedding in Northumbria this year, so when she and a group of friends and family decided to go on holiday to Corfu she knew immediately who had to come along. “It was a celebration of life,” she says. “I’d had breast cancer and been in chemo – there was so much we were celebrating in that week.”

Gemmell accompanied Whitfield and her party to capture, she hoped, the “magic and fun” of the trip. “So far he’s just teased us with a 90-second trailer,” Whitfield says. But it’s made her excited to see the rest.

At about £2,500 a day, Whitfield knows it’s an extravagant alternative to taking holiday snaps, but she believes it’s worth it. “People these days hardly ever print out their photographs; they don’t do anything with them. It’s insane. In the old days, you used to have photo albums. But now we’ve stopped capturing those moments.”

High-end home movies are also the business of Lisa Ridd, who set up the New York company Smitten Films four years ago and produces movies using people’s own mobile phone footage.

For about $750 [£570], clients get a 30-minute film. The “annual highlights” package, with footage from the whole year, is the biggest seller, Ridd says. But the summer holiday video is growing fast. “People do family movie nights, get the popcorn out and make a really big deal of it,” she says.

“What people shoot is not perfect and it’s not always beautiful. But it’s authentic. It’s about telling the story of your life. Lighting, sound, backing music – none of that is really important. Parents want to hear the sound of their toddlers trying to feed themselves, their kids playing in the pool. When you look back at your own footage, you’re going to have an emotional reaction to it.”

Tom Hewett, a UK-based events videographer who runs Hawaiian Shirt Photography, believes the show-off aspect of social culture is the key to this reinvention of the home movie. “People were less interested in a video historically because, frankly, what were they going to do with it? Make the family sit through it at Christmas? Now, people link it to Facebook and say to their friends: ‘Hey, check out this cool film.’”

He thinks taking a videographer on holiday might be going a bit too far, but adds: “It’s not something I would rule out – it’s just I don’t tend to get those Made in Chelsea type of clients. My core business is a nice civil wedding in a barn in Surrey.”

Hewett is experimenting with a service where he lends out high-definition cameras and microphones so people can do their own filming. He then edits it into a movie for them. “People might film absolute crap. But then maybe you can get around that by adding lots of cheesy effects and blinging it up.”