Make Better Wedding Films

When you see a high heel shoe with a red sole, you know it’s a Louboutin, or at least a knock off pretending to be a Louboutin. This is an example of a brand signature, something that when people see it, the brand instantly comes to mind. Sharrone from Fiore Films is very, very aware of the power that a brand signature can have and that is why whenever you see a wedding film that is entirely shot...

NOTE: My microphone disconnected immediately after jumping on this call so I apologise for my audio quality! Thankfully Dylan does most of the talking and I've started using a new recording method moving forward to hopefully avoid these technical mishaps in the future! Thanks and enjoy the show. ---- Dylan Kitchener’s extremely cinematic and intimate portraits of couples are an inspiration to many...

We're back for Season 3!!!!   S3 E1 - The Art of Adapting ft. Calen Rhome - White in Revery   Being able to adapt to your environment is a skill that takes time to master. You need to be confident in your tools, confident in your environment and confident in knowing what you do and don’t need to tell your story.  When you think of White in Revery, you think of beautiful, smooth, pol...

It’s time to start to say goodbye to 2021 and also to say “seeya later” to the incredible @bottlebrushfilms who are finishing up their season on Make Better Wedding Films. I’ve got Grace and Andrew on for one final time to catch up, have a beer and hear about all the incredible projects and plans they have in store for 2022. We also answer a bunch of your questions from Instagram live. So pop a co...

Ivan & Angela of the Unique Wedding are different to most wedding filmmakers. For them, filming the wedding is an extra. What they really offer is a multi-day experience for couples to create an incredible memory in and around their wedding day.  This may or may not be a direction you want to take in your career as a wedding filmmaker but what I do hope you take away from today’s episode...

You might be looking at aspirational, world famous, amazing wedding filmmakers and be thinking, “If only I could shadow them, if only I could watch them work, I could learn their secret sauce, the thing that makes them stand out from the rest”.  The truth of the matter is… there is no secret sauce. Everyone is nervous on a wedding day, everyone finds directing uncomfortable, everyone get’s th...

Life throws us all curve balls and today’s guests are no exception, but rather than seeking solitude in the status quo, Shannon and Jack decided it was time for them to try something bold and new.  Through battling health issues and launching a brand new business at the start of a global pandemic, these two have come through with the most amazing spirit and attitude towards their life and the...

To be a creative storyteller is to be a listener, to be someone who is more interested in the story of others than their own. When it comes to wedding filmmaking, this means being passionately invested in the couple and who the are, making a film that is solely for them.    This is Eric’s philosophy for wedding filmmaking and it’s how he’s able to make the emotionally charged films that...

Each of us as filmmakers come to the table with a different set of skills, some coming more naturally to us than others and today’s guest is an example of how people skills and the ability to read a room are as important as knowing the ins and outs of your camera.  Hunter describes himself as an extrovert, which is not a label I would assign to myself, so it was great to learn from how he app...

Grace and Andrew have built an impressive audience of 120 thousand followers on Bottlebrush’s TikTok by showcasing their films and their personality, resulting in real enquires through their website. With over 1 billion monthly users now using TikTok we thought it was about time to do a deep dive on the platform, address some common concerns among videographers and talk through some ideas for how...

Sometimes someone creates something so fresh and out of the box that people can’t help but stop and take notice. Today, Andrew and I are sitting down with wedding photographer David Le, who created a Wes Anderson inspired, stop motion masterpiece of a film that was nominated for Junebug's best wedding film 2021. However, the catch here is that it was so time consuming and difficult to create, that...

We’ve talked a bit about being an empathetic filmmaker on this podcast before and today’s guest is yet another example of why this skill is a vital piece of the puzzle when it comes to making truly unique and standout work. Being able to connect with your couples first and foremost and make a film that’s for them, not for you or your ego as a creative, but for them is what results in art that has...

Grace got a HUGE amount of DMs after posting her latest wedding film asking how in the heck she did what she did! So today we are answering all your questions and breaking this edit down piece by piece. If you haven't seen the film yet, make sure you check it out here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CS5CFCoBdqX/ This is basically a mini masterclass in editing techniques from the legend herself so se...

This podcast is all about helping you find and develop your unique style of wedding filmmaking, something that your couples will see and think “that’s us, that’s what we want!”. But this often goes beyond the films themselves, couples connect with the filmmaker as much as the films and so on today’s show, we’re talking to UK videographer Russell Kent Nicholls about his all-round approach to how he...

We often have a certain style of film that we prefer to create, whether it’s more moody and “cinematic” or fun and upbeat, but the reality is that most weddings contain a full spectrum of emotions and energies. Today I’m talking to Stanton Giles of @filmsbystanton because his work, I feel, is a rare example that shows the full spectrum of emotions on a wedding day. On today’s show we’ll be breakin...

I’ve had a few types of episodes on my to-do list since rebranding this podcast and today is one of those episodes. Today we are looking at music videos to see what we can learn from them, what ideas we can add to our toolbox and how we might adapt them for wedding films. Now today we’ll just be looking at a small selection of music videos to come out recently because the idea for this kind of epi...

Malcolm Gladwell describes his famous “10,000 hours” heuristic as a symbol for the fact that the time needed to develop an innate understanding for a particular skill is most likely longer than any of us anticipate at the outset. On today’s episode I’m joined by the incredibly talented Gione da Silva, who shares basically a whole two day workshop worth of content on lighting, composition, posing a...

No Grace or Andrew today team, I'm flying solo! ----------------------------------- We’re often chasing a certain aesthetic or style in our work, light and airy, dark and moody, fun, cinematic, emotional, whatever it is we are constantly trying to get our work closer to the image of it that’s in our heads. Some of us take a very methodical, structured approach while others rely more heavily on the...

On our instagram page I have a little line in the bio that invites people to DM us if they want to review their films. Our guest today, Sid from House on the Clouds, a Mumbai based wedding film and photo company took up that offer and sent me a message asking for a critique of his latest film and I was absolutely mind blow, it was incredible. I wrote back immediately and said you have to come on t...

Christian O'Reilly from the award winning UK based photo and video company Fire and Ice joins Andrew, Grace and myself for an epic episode to share how he and his 12 person studio create crazy, epic, unique, boundary pushing films. The three of us walked away from this interview so inspired!!!!!! From storyboarding entire wedding films, to blasting FPV drones around French chateaus, you are guaran...

Working for yourself is the dream. For a lot of us, we are lucky enough for this to now be our reality. But the flexibility of working for yourself can easily lead to a blur in the distinction between work time and personal time. We end up feeling guilty when we aren’t working and feeling distracted when we try to sit down and focus. We procrastinate, we get behind on our workload, we doubt oursel...

Music selection is an integral part of the wedding film process. When done right, it can motivate your editing and help define your overall style as a wedding filmmaker, but for many people, the actual task of finding and selecting music can be one of the slowest and most frustrating parts of the entire process. On today’s show, Grace and I discuss our various methods for finding unique tracks for...

Today’s episode is quite special because it’s the coming together of a few pieces of inspiration that have been bouncing around in my head for a while. I’ve followed Katherine’s work for a long time and have been obsessed with her use of colour, her use of light, her textures, but most importantly, the elements of fantasy and poetry that come through in her images. I’ve always wondered how I could...

Today marks a very exciting new chapter in the evolution of the show because it is the first episode with one of my new co-hosts this year. Grace and Andrew, aka Grandrew, aka Bottlebrush Films will be joining me in alternating shifts on most episodes this year, with Andrew’s camera mastery and Grace’s editing wizardry… it’s going to be a good year! We’ll still be interviewing guests from time to...

Heuristic /ˌhjʊ(ə)ˈrɪstɪk/ noun A heuristic technique, or a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. This week I’m joined Bobby Burns from Wedding Film School and together we’ll be coming up wi...