Wedding documentary movie by Utskhography

Hello!

Proving that your wedding video is not a feast at all and it is sophisticated and well done (or edited) is just a delusion.  However, there are exceptions as well; though nowadays in Georgia 90% of so-called full videos are nothing more than feasts.

What I call a feast!

This is a video on which neither operator nor editor have done a hard job, it can be made with DSLR or with high resolution camera, but still editing and recording line repeats the wedding line of your friends. Simple story: the morning came, we went to the beauty salon, after doing a makeup we are going to the church, then comes road… road… road… and after wedding ceremony in the church there comes a photo session. Poses… the bridegroom stands in the middle and others stand in a queue like the railway carriages. Or, everyone is in the air.

Quite original!

No, it is more genius than original!

We go to the hall, road… road… road… (Small statistical data: road shots take 15% and sometimes even 20% of the whole video).

The hall scenarios are all the same, those similar weddings make me think that toast men watch wedding videos of others and make a classification of the toasts. More exactly, they make a cover of other wedding scenarios. Dance Daisi (it is called Daisi, yes?), again toast man, dance, toast man, dance, toast man… in the end you find toast man in the wedding video more often than the bride and the bridegroom. Then there come fireworks, kites, wedding cake and a bouquet!

It’s time to go home.

This is what I call a wedding feast!

You may say that I am wrong or just exaggerate and this is Georgian traditional wedding, but… how do we know that our ancestors were having exactly such kind of weddings? Was the scenario the same? And even if it is true, why do we need to show it so clearly with drunk party people and obscene scenes? And one more thing, I cannot understand why people take wedding DVDs of their neighbors at home and watch them for 2-3 hours with pleasure.

This is what WE don’t watch!

This is what WE don’t film!

Khose is filming bride in beauty salon

Wedding feast video VS Documentary film by Utskhography?

VS – Versus, against!

Now, let’s find out what we call documentary film in our studio.

Though at first I want to recall my first meeting with documentaries. It was in 2009, when I was given one (maybe 100 dollar) camera in Tbilisi and asked to film interesting people I would bump into. In the beginning I though this camera and this whole story was just a game, I was running and shooting different stories. Those stories were called “Telavi Series”, which was extremely strange for people at the beginning and later on became accepted and loveable for Telavi and Kakheti. So, gradually I collected about 20 Telavi Series for media organization “Go Group”. I studied montage and shooting there, thus I believe that I had the best teacher ever, his name is Dato Phiphia. With the help of Dato and the whole “Go Group” I found out how a documentary amateur film is made.

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And still what is a documentary wedding film?

This is the first question people ask me when I tell them that I don’t shoot an ordinary wedding video and I have my own way of shooting.

The word documentary sounds a little bit vague itself, because every wedding video is already documentary, but as I already mentioned above, most of them have got the same story line and the same montage style. That’s why it exceeds the frames of the documentary film and becomes quite artificial.

The main difference between those two videos is:

a) we start shooting a few days or weeks before the wedding and the “feasts” cover only the wedding day.

b) we interview different people (family, best men, friends) about the love story and the “feasts” don’t contain any interviews. 

c) We separate every event (religious wedding, photosession, etc;) into short blocks, put different music as a background and make each of them 3-4 minutes long (that’s why a viewer watches a constantly changing shots and music)

d) we shoot every event with two ot three cameras, that doesn’t generally happen in ordinary weddings. Consequently, we have two angles of one dance or an interview.

e) We treat documentary films as a project: we meet couple beforehand, discuss the scenario with them, choose a place for shooting and etc; after the wedding we sort the whole material, discuss the scenario and the plot again, edit, separate and edit again. It is a process when the most creative ideas are coming and one has to discuss it with the customer.

As far as I know, such kind of process is unknown for the videos that most of the studios shoot in a day and as a rule edit it in a day or at least in a week.

As a video and not a film.

One more difference is in price. 
Our film is expensive, because shooting and montage process continues for a long time, therefore requires a hard work as far as it is an ordinary film. Sometimes our film costs 6-7 times more than ordinary videos.  


On the one hand, it is not good for us, because generally the customer is searching for the cheaper and quicker.

But as far as our film is expensive – we have a chance to work more rarely, but perform a quality work slowly. Such a huge project (sometimes the material for editing is 40-50 hours long) needs a careful thought, discussion and a slow realization. As a result we get an expensive, a rare and a high quality product. All these are regulated by a high price and the market.

There are still more differences, but I don’t want to make you bored. I believe that it’s enough to make you sure that if your wedding is ahead you will order a film to our studio and you will refuse a boring and banal video. If you don’t have enough money we advise you to reduce the number of guests, e.g. you can invite 250 people instead of 300, however you are going to own an original video, that you will watch any time with your friends, children or even with your grandchildren. Your video is going to be appreciated in future.

So, don’t regret money (that you still spend on inviting your distant relatives) to buy a quality product.