Keeping things interesting!
Every wedding and video shoot has its own unique challenges and forces us to learn and re-adapt. Today’s post and lesson is, KEEPING IT INTERESTING!
Yesterday I had a fantastic wedding experience. Not only were the couple fun and easy to work with (I met them many months ago and we have been eagerly anticipating their big wedding day) the rest of their creative team was excellent to work with as well! (shout out to Arlene Chambers). To top it all off, we got to attend and capture an Egyptian wedding ceremony at a local church in Lynnwood.
I've written about this before, but it really is a fun way to keep things fresh and interesting by booking clients of different ethnicities and religions. Obviously you can't really control what kinds of clients come your way (except maybe marketing to specific groups) but I think it's really important to jump at the opportunity to experience and observe a different custom or tradition than you would normally encounter in your everyday life.
Besides the church being absolutely beautiful, it was a treat to witness the hour long ceremony that included a pair of "priests" I guess you would say, performing various acts that concluded in the couple being married. The couple was dressed in beautiful robes or "cloaks" got family blessings and even wore symbolic crowns. At the end the one priest pulled back a curtain to unveil the sacred area in the back of the church, an area where apparently women aren't allowed to enter. From what I could tell from my vantage point near the altar, it contained some sort of baptismal area as well as huge murals of Jesus and other symbolic figures. The couple's knelt in the back and received a final blessing in front of the entire church before being announced as husband and wife, celebrating in front of family and friends.
What was the most interesting about the whole experience was how it seemed to blend normal Catholicism (with the Our Father prayer and other various chants and songs) as well as foreign traditions with the priest speaking Arabic and a choir of men singing along and playing various percussion instruments. I'm probably doing a terrible job of explaining and I hope I don't have too much of the terminology wrong, but as a complete outsider stepping into this kind of situation for the first time, it really was eye-opening and honestly really neat.
Being a wedding videographer leaves me most of the time filming and attending traditional Western wedding ceremonies and that's interesting in its own right. Having the ability to sprinkle in a few various non-traditional (at least to me) wedding events throughout the year is a great way to open my perspective as a wedding vendor, and make me all the better for it. It gives me a greater knowledge base that I can use to attract and book more clients in the future, and that's never a bad thing!