A Grand Entrance~ Introducing the ReMix!

I needed to start writing again.

However, the adage ‘write what you know’ has gotten sort of in the way of that considering since I’ve started doing weddings, and some would say since I started college, I don’t know much of anything. Now, though, I can say I know something about weddings and so why not weddings to rekindle my lifelong belabored relationship with writing.

I will not be talking about weddings in this post, though. I will likely touch on it in the next, when I formally introduce the blog and make inane chatter about SEOs and educational content and Dear Abbys and whatnot.

I am talking here about wedding films and why I’ve grown immensely tired of them. When I began, I was essentially fresh out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and their film program, where I more or less tried to attach myself to the Arthouse film kids, to little avail. I took documentary courses with creative outsiders, I hung around multi-talented artists, I was coerced into admiring trust fund kids, the works. I had an education that was far less the explicit material of the course and more the rubbing of influences with inventive minds all experimenting with their voice and learning to do half-assed impressions of those voices while self-deprecatingly stumbling with my own. And, so, doing that, I left with a particular sense of what a film could be and how to make a film that wasn’t quite a film but still fit the most basic definition of a film, so let’s just call it a film.

So, I graduated from that, and I was not gifted a small film budget to start creating on my own, and I take orders terribly, so I eventually landed on weddings through another story I will detail in the future. I entered wedding videography with the brain that an incredibly inspired class of filmmakers helped craft, a brain that cited Bergman, Micheaux, Jodorowsky and Eisenstein as influences. I tried to make films that were evocative and poetic moreso than chronological. And it is to no fault of anyone’s that I kept hitting the wall that was my client just didn’t like what I was going for.

“This was nice, but could you put the events in order.”
”The first part doesn’t make any sense, can you take it out it has nothing to do with the wedding.”
” The second song is kind of inappropriate for a wedding, don’t you think?”

These are valid. So I experimented less and less and adjusted myself to the wishes of my clients. Linear. Direct. Light and fun, even if the color palette is moody.

I guess it isn’t proper to say I’m tired of wedding films. It is more weddings films have exhausted me of my creative spark. And even when a bride, a wonderful, beautiful, sweet, cool bride, tells me to take full license with my creativity I understand 1) there are limitations and 2) I will always default to telling a light-hearted linear film and the creativity I’m exhibiting is shunted.

Passion death is a word someone used in a conversation with me and I feel like they peeled a chunk of skin off in doing so and suggested that I am rotting. The rotting that happens when you take something you are wholly passionate about and give it up to the demands of others, that you do not allow it to be yours alone or yours to do with what you want, but that it belongs to people who are not entirely sure what to do with it via an economic transaction. And they give it back to you and they did not feed it properly, they did not shelter it, they did not water it, they did not nurture it, it is rotting and brittle and peeling and tired. And this is not something to disparage my brides and grooms, who I adore and produce works that I am clearly proud and happy to make for them because it is something that makes them happy and even my middling experimental effort is able to produce beautiful films and I do not shy from this and I still make creative decisions. I am referring to an economic thing. I am referring to that I did film and pursued and studied entirely out of love for the craft and the language it evoked and being in the presence of incredible art and now it is not art, but a commodity with a limited budget. Simpler to say, I do not have a passion wedding project because no one will give me money to do anything other than the wedding film they desire for their wedding, and while that is a healthy transaction and produces something good, I am not engaging in an act of pure passion, a thing for me.

I don’t think any wedding creative feels differently and if they say otherwise they are merchants, not artists.

But, I am changing that. I am existing in 2021 with Intention, and part of that intention is nurturing my soul and to nurture my soul I must, god forbid, become a pretentious film nerd again. I am challenging myself in the editing room to not just make more inventive wedding films, but to challenge what a Wedding Film can be.

You have your wedding film, correct? Shot of scenery, presumably some voice over of the vows or letters, likely a drone shot. You carry a few more scenery shots into your sequence and then show a clip of the bride or groom, reading the voice over you’re hearing, with shots of them getting ready in front of a window and laughing with their friends on their big day. If you’re fancy and charge $10,000 you have a drone shot of them overlooking a coastline or running on a sand dune with some clever super-impositions. If you’re really good about trying to be an artist, you probably shot something with them before the wedding in an alternate location that has a grain and noise effect on it. Or you’re a Instagram-body and you have a super exciting first minute w/ dramatic cuts of the reception and ceremony, but then move into the very average chronological film. Inevitably though, you move through the first look, getting ready, into the ceremony, to the first dances and other parts of the reception. This is the film. Nothing different happens. God forbid someone leaves any event out.

I know there has to be a better way to tell these stories, or at least more unique ways to do so. I am doing a ReMix! series, or a Wedding Film Poem, something pretentious, so that I can do this and truly enjoy myself. I am proud of the work I do for my brides but if I handed any of them a 10 min experimental cut with intense colors and sampling of NIN’s “Hurt” they would be reasonably put off by that and I’d lose any remaining semblance of professionalism I have left. I want to explore the emotional story of a day that exists outside of the physical story, the material process of a wedding. I think there are ways to tell wedding stories that are based off rhythm, themes and symbolism with underlying ideas that involve darker tones and stranger sounds and ideas you saw in foreign film once. I think French New Wave and Soviet Montage have a place in wedding videography. I think surrealism and absurdism have a place in wedding videography. I think instead of watching other wedding films to learn how to make a better wedding films, I should watch more Wes Anderson and Jane Campion and Martin Scorsese.

Because the thing, ultimately, why I’m tired of wedding films, is because I’ve gotten to a point where I can figure out which body and lens a person is using. At this juncture, that is what differentiates so much of these films. The problem with wedding videography is that it’s purely commercial. No one makes a wedding film for themselves bc they have a passion project in mind, but solely as a market demand. And you very seldom work with a bride and groom who have that command over the filmmaking that they know how to communicate THEIR passion onto YOUR filmmaking. And, as much as you like or even love a couple, I know I’ve loved couples and poured myself into their film, how can be passionate for their film? It’s genuinely a difficult position, as the passion I’m referring to is the intuitive and ethereal aesthetic emotion you have, almost with another reality within yourself, to create something out of whim. To look at the materials given to you and to be struck with an unspoken understanding of how to make something of that which stirs you.

So, what I’m trying to do, with films I’ve already finished and shipped off so that I will have no problems since I own the footage, is do a passion project with wedding films, in making my own extremely inventive and bizarre and exciting Remix!s. I take the footage I have, I look it over, I look over the original and I figure out, “What is a way to tell this day’s story that is interesting to me?” What is the sequence of shots, irrespective of where they belong in the chronology, that has the greatest emotional impact and truly grips me.

And, although I will be sharing them constantly, as with this blog, it is ultimately for me and I do not mind if no one cares for it. I make enough to get by. With a price increase I can make enough to pay off my debts AND get by and that is enough for me. I do not want to exist in financial desperation as it ties with my art. I want to create so that I may feel challenged and rewarded, not so I can be told “that’s nice but I don’t think that part is really appropriate for a wedding film, don’t you think?” because where I’m going, that word, “wedding film”, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.

It’s Party Time, baby! Time to get weird and make art.