Ok, all you Video – ographers listen up. It’s over. Done. Finished. Kaput. You have been reduced to playing “Angry Birds” behind a pair of sticks that used to hold your camera up. You used to be able to turn “Pink Flamingos” into “Love Story.” Eastwood couldn’t touch you back in the day.

Remember when your biggest barrier to success was the bride’s mother and the portly cherub of a bride-to-be who begged you to take thirty pounds off her in post? Oh, that was nothing. Now you have 40 dickheads with iPhones getting better shots than you because you were sober and you couldn’t get your rig into the ladies room. I was at a wedding once where the cameraman was pushing a Sony 250 in a shopping cart trying to create a motion shot.

I did a few weddings when I first started. At first, you think it’s cool. You wear a tux and mingle with all the chicks dressed up for each other. After about the 13-14th hour it starts to wear thin and then there’s the two month edit that goes back and forth, back and forth. If you’re lucky, the bride’s father won’t insert himself into the action (after all, he’s paying, he’ll mention a thousand times) “I’m seeing the groom’s father is getting way too much face time, get him out of there. I’m payin’ ya know”.

The first wedding I ever did was helping my friend Mike do a Greek wedding in Watertown. Mike was up on a pedestal in plain view of the whole church when he starts falling asleep. That should have been my first clue. It didn’t go any better from there. I was supposed to create an instant edit in a coatroom at the Royal Sonesta reception hall and lost 10 years off my life.

Sometimes, if the brides are feeling frisky, they invite you over to their house before the ceremony and you capture footage of them getting prepped: hair, nails, eyes, makeup and sometimes into their bedroom where they really want to iron your wrinkles out. I think some of them popped the cork early because if they had a pole in that room, it would have paid for the honeymoon.

Some were very sexy, some, not so much. Someone shot some footage of an extremely huge black girl in her bedroom in her Victoria Secrets (think sling shot) gyrating to some jungle music and played it at this guy Hal’s 60th birthday party. That was too much, even for me, so I snuk out the back door and picked up an application for my gay card and went home. Jesus up in Heaven help me!

So I moved over to the corporate side of the street where I thought the lunacy levels would be less intense. But that’s for another day. But I will leave you with an e-mail I just got from a PR agency, usually an AA who calls herself an account associate.

She was looking for me to cover a ribbon cutting ceremony in Waltham, send her the feetage so she could pick out the “snips” she needed.  Snips. Yeah, I getcha!

If you have any questions or need advice, please feel free to reach out to me here.

Bob O’Hearn
508-517-6714
bob@doubleocreative.com