I got the most wonderful email tonight from Ashley and David.  I shot their wedding this past November at All Saints Catholic Church on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.  I remember the first meeting I had with Ashley, she had been referred to me by a couple who’s wedding I shot in October of 2008.  When Ashely first started talking with me she was not sure if she wanted to even have a video done.  When I asked her why, she said that she just didn’t think that a video would be that important to her. Well, as you can see by her quote, I think she was glad she changed her mind:

“Don, you did a phenomenal job from start to finish with our wedding video. You and your staff are so pleasant to work with and you had us excited about our video from day one. We knew you would make it special and create a wedding keepsake like no other. Hesitant about having a videographer at first, we are very glad that we choose you to capture one of the happiest days of our lives. The trailer was a great ’sneak peek’ at what was to come for our wedding video. Seeing our trailer left us anxious to see the finished product. Upon receiving our videos, we had a wedding viewing party with our parents. It was unanimous– the video is priceless. We will treasure it forever. The first thing both our parents said was ‘ We wish we had a video like this of our wedding’. Thank You Don for capturing the first day of the rest of our lives as husband and wife! ”
-Ashley & David

Thank you Ashley and David, you guys were so much fun to work with.  I wish you nothing but the best in your future.

Here is their trailer:

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I want to invite you to the Mia Photography’s first annual “With This Ring Bridal Day” for a one of a kind bridal show.  Most bridal shows you attend are very large with so many vendors, most brides tend to get overloaded with information or lost in the shuffle.  These bridal shows are also loud and crowded which gives you little to no time with the vendors.

“With This Ring Bridal Day” will be completely different. First off there will only be a few vendors present.  Mia Photography has picked the very best to be part of this show.  I have worked with most of these vendors before and can tell you, they are the best of the best in Knoxville.

The show will not be in a huge convention center with a fashion show going on in the background. The show will be in the Mia Photography’s studios on Peters Road near the Panera Bread.   This is going to be a very intimate setting where you can actually spend some one on one time with each vendor.

I am happy to announce that I will be a part of this show and would love to meet as many of the area brides as possible.  If you go to the web site and register now you will get a free wedding planner with over $1000 in discounts and giveaways from the participating professionals and an entry for a free engagement session and custom guestbook from Mia Photography.  Space is limited so please register soon.  The show will be on Sunday February 21st from 1 – 5pm.

I will be having a giveaway at the show that day.  If you register with me at the show, you have a chance to win the CD “7 Steps to a Stress-Free Wedding”.

This CD is produced by one of the leading wedding insider, Rick Brewer.  Rick Brewer is no stranger to the Wedding Industry. Rick has been in the wedding industry since 1992 and has accomplished the following:

Growing up in the 70’s, you typically had three ways to communicate with someone.  You could travel to their house, if they lived close enough.  You could make a long distance phone call (remember, unlimited long distance calling didn’t exist until a couple years ago) or you could write a letter, mail it and wait a week or two to get a response. The cheapest was to use the mail, but it also took the longest.

Today, we live in a society where we have cell phones and landline phones with free long distance, email, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook and video chats.  You can now get in touch with anyone in a moments notice.  We live in a media savvy culture where we get news in a 24 hour cycle with video being shot by everyone who has a cell phone.  We no longer want to hear about the news or events, we want to see it.

This goes along with an article I saw the other day from The Knot that listed the top 10 trends in weddings this year. One of those trends is something brand new for brides and just getting noticed.

Video-Save-The-Date

When you really think about it, it goes along with what we all want in today’s culture – something visual.

The Video-Save-The-Date really opens the door to brides for them to be as creative as they want.  This gives them the ability to do something that many of their friends didn’t have the option to do.

You want your wedding to stand out, to be different, to be one that your guests will remember for years.  Then start that as early as possible with a Video-Save-The-Date DVD that you can send to your friends and family and post online.

So, what does this look like?  It can look any way you want it to look.  It can have a simple, classic look, like this

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Or you can get a little creative and do something like this:

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But, if you really want to get their attention, you can go all out and do something like this:

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Can you just imagine your guest getting one of these in the mail?  Or having a great website with this video being the feature to kick off your wedding planning.  How excited would everyone be for your wedding?

We can do Video-Save-The-Date DVDs and Videos for any bride.  Not only can we do the video part but we can also put it all together for you with full color photo labels on the disk.  We would place it in a wonderful jewel case ready for you to mail out.  Just think how excited you would be to get a DVD in the mail and see this from one of your closest friends.

Contact us today for a free consultation for your Video-Save-The-Date.

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I have joined Wes and Danielle Hope of Hope Photography in their “Perfect Ten: 10/10/10: The Coolest Contest Ever”!!  I am so excited about this.  I have worked with Wes and Danielle before and can tell you that they are great photographers and a wonderful team.  I love their style and the way they capture all the beauty and precious moments, but they also always seem to get the absolute best from the bride.  Oh, and they have a really great sense of humor that you can’t help but laugh.

They are celebrating their 10th anniversary of marriage and 10 years as wedding photographers.  And as a way to celebrate they are having a contest to giveaway a wedding package for a wedding on 10/10/10.  You can go to their website for all the details and rules.  As part of the giveaway, I am giving away the video of the ceremony for the lucky couple who wins.  There are some other great wedding vendors contributing services for this contest like One Enchanted Evening and Lisa Foster.  So, visit their site now and sign up today.  You could win.

Be sure and check my blog in a few weeks as I am going to be having a special promotion myself during the month of February.  I will be sharing those details in the coming days.  Also, there are some new things I am doing that I will be sharing with you in some future blogs to come out soon.

It has been a long dry spell for my blog posting as of late. I could give a lot of excuses for not posting; Christmas holidays, family committments, year end work, floods, new additions to the family… the list could go on for days but the fact of the matter is I have just not had time to get in the postings I need to.  So let me take a few moments to catch you up on what has been going on with Midnight Magic Studios.

I had two great weddings to wrap up 2009 and they were connected in a really wonderful way.  I had booked a wedding for November 28th, with Ashley in the late summer.  She was just so excited about her wedding when we first met that I knew her wedding and reception was going to be just off the wall.  And it was.  Then, three weeks before her wedding, I got a call from a mother of the bride for a November 21st wedding.  I had the date open and was more than happy to help capture the day for her daughter Sarah.  As I was doing my planning I got a call from Ashley who asked me if I was doing a wedding on the 21st.  I told her I was and much to my surprise, Sarah is a friend of hers.  Not only that, but I was going to be working with the same photographer on both weddings, Kristen Overbay. I have worked with Kristen before and I know what a great job she does. Both weddings were great and I have just finished up both of their videos.  I still have some clean up work to do on both of them and they should be going out soon.

The Christmas holidays were great, but we had some huge changes here at home.  First, we had a new addition to the family: Boomer, who is a Snorkie.  I know you are asking… what is a Snorkie?  Well, he is a mix between a Yorkie and a ShiTzu, thus a Snorkie.  Boomer is a great addition and has added quite a lot of laughter to the house. The two other dogs are not laughing so much, but the adjustments are being made well.  Then, right before Christmas my wife’s car bit the dust.  It didn’t break down, it just got to the point where it was not safe to drive anymore… “frame fatique”.   So, the week of Christmas, we went car shopping which resulted in us a great Honda Accord that my wife is very happy with.

I hope 2010 is off to a great start for everyone.

One of the greatest complements I get from a bride is when she refers a friend of hers to me.  That means the world to me.  It means I did a good job and provided the bride with something she will cherish forever and she wants her friends to have the same thing for their wedding day.  This past weekend I shot a wedding for Ashley & David.  Ashley was sent to me by Lindsey, whose wedding I did in October 2008.  I was able to talk with Lindsey and her husband Chris for a few minutes Saturday.  They were telling me how they just celebrated their one year anniversary and one thing they did was they watched their wedding video again.  I could go on and tell you more about it, but let them tell you:

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I love the fact that were willing to take a few moments out of a special day for Ashley and share with you how much their video means to them.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting some new trailers for wedding I have worked on this fall.

There are a lot of advantages to working from home.  I get to spend some great time with both my wife and daughter.  I can be home when our daughter is home sick from school.  I get to do my errands and general running around during the day while most others are at work.  One of my guilty pleasures of working from home is bad daytime TV shows.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not sitting at home all day watching TV but most days when I come into the office to get started on my editing I most likely have the TV on. This happened yesterday and it was by far the most interesting part of my day.

I had just gotten our daughter off to school and came out to my office to get started on some editing.  The morning new show was on so I didn’t pay it much attention.  Well, after the morning news show goes off in our area, there is one of those Judge shows. You know the kind, any judge with some personality trying to decide who did what to who and two people who are more than likely just wanting to get some face time on TV.  Now I will admit there is one Judge show that I like to watch, but it is on mostly at night. Anyway, I was getting ready to turn the TV off when they introduced the case and stopped dead in my tracks.  Seems this bride is suing her wedding videographer.

OK, you have my full attention!  Seems this bride wanted someone to both photograph and video her wedding day.  She wanted the same person to do both.  Nothing unusual about that but I have to say, it is hard to do both so I don’t know some vendors do both like that.  This bride ended up hiring her cousin-in-law because he said he could do both and not charge her a lot of money.  Well, they played the tape of the video he shot and it was like looking through a set of blinds.  Big black bars running across the screen.  This is caused when the heads on the video camera are either dirty or damaged.  Here is the funny part, the videographer said he didn’t know the camera was doing that because it looked just fine to him as he was taping it and he could fix it.  First off, if you are looking through the camera viewfinder, you would not see any problems of a dirty or damaged video head.  You should get a warning that the head is dirty, but not always.  Second, you can not fix that problem.  You can’t go back and add video to places where it was not recorded. But, what knock me off my seat was the fact he could not tell the Judge what type, brand or model of camera he uses.  WHAT!!  How can you NOT know what type or brand of equipment your using?

I can tell you not only the brand and model of every item I use on your wedding video, but I also know how each one works and how to make it do all the things it was designed to do.  If your photographer can’t tell you what he/she is using, you need to run, don’t walk, but run away very fast.

This got me to thinking about one of the biggest excuse I hear from brides about not hiring a professional videographer.  “I have a family member who will video the wedding for me.”  Now, they may have a family member who is a professional videographer and that is great.  But more times than not, it is just a family member with a hand held camcorder and that person has no idea what they are doing or what shots to get.  This poor bride thought she was saving money by having a “family member” shoot her wedding when in fact, all she did was loose a very precious memory that she will never be able to get back.

One of my best training grounds in video was working for a local “Shop-At-Home” network.  It was a live 24/7 shopping network.  There was no stopping to reset a shot, fixing a light, or changing a script.  I had to think on my feet whenever a problem would come up.  It is the same thing with your wedding.  You don’t want me to stand up in the middle of everything and yell, “CUT,  we need to have the bride go back up the aisle because I didn’t get the shot of her smile.”.  It is the same thing with your cousin, uncle or brother shooting your wedding.  They don’t know where to be to get that image of the bride coming up the aisle.  They most likely don’t have wireless microphones to pick up the sound of your vows to each other.  And they sure wouldn’t know if the heads on the camcorder are damaged or dirty until it was too late.

I have a long list of things that have to be done BEFORE I ever leave the house to shoot your wedding.  One of those things is to make sure the heads are clean and in perfect working order.  But, I also have the knowledge to know what to do in the event it does happen.  I also have the experience and knowledge to know what to do in the event there is a problem during the ceremony.  I have had a couple of wedding where there was a problem with either the video tape breaking or a problem with the sound, but the bride never knew it happened.  At one wedding, in fact, my wireless mics interfered with the churches sound system. As soon as I knew what was going on, I took the steps needed to fix the problem.  The only other person who knew something was wrong was the gentleman running the churches sound system.

I ran into that bride just the other day and we were talking about her video and she just gushed about it.  In fact, she has not even picked up her pictures from the photographer yet.  Not because they are not ready, but because she loves the video more than the pictures.  I told her about the problem and she looked at me and said, “I never noticed that there was anything wrong with the video and we watched it last night for the 900th time.”  Now, if I had stopped her wedding to fix the mics, I would not be working today.

So, if your thinking of having a family member shoot your wedding, ask yourself,  do you want to save money or do you want to save a memory?  Oh, and for the court case on the Judge show, the bride won and got all her money back.

I was thrilled to find out today that I was STAR’s Spotlight Volunteer this month.  Here is the excerpt from their newsletter…

I have been doing wedding video’s since 2002.  I have been doing them full time since 2005 and every year it just keeps getting better and better.  I get new equipment, learn a new technique or make new friends.  But one thing that never changes, I love working with my brides and I am having fun doing it.  The biggest thing I have learned over the years is that every wedding, every bride, every event is different.  Some brides are carefree and laid back.  Some brides stress over every detail.  Some brides want the romantic “story book” wedding while others go as non-traditional as possible.  That’s what makes weddings so much fun and one of the reasons why I love doing wedding videos.

This past Saturday I got to shoot Brooke and Kareem’s wedding.  This couple was just so much fun to work with.  They both were just so relaxed and easy going the entire day.  They had fun the entire day and that carried over to the reception when the happy couple made their grand entrance with a small tribute to Michael Jackson.  Kareem put on a wig, hat and one rhinestone covered white glove and danced into the reception to the cheers of their guest.

The flowers you see were done by Lisa Foster Designs.  The entire day was put together and coordinated by Brenda Johnson and her team at One Enchanted Evening.

Here is the trailer for their wedding, I hope you enjoy it:

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This is the trailer for Star & Pina’s wedding from September 5, 2009.  Star was a beautiful bride, full of light and life.  She was so much fun to work with.  Pina was very shy about getting on camera before the wedding.  I can honestly say, I have never seen a more nervous groom, but the minute Star turned the corner and he saw her for the first time, he calmed down and really looked very happy.  The sky looked like it was going to open up and rain on us any minute, but the rain held off all day and they had a great time at their reception.  I offer my blessings and prayers for both Star and Pina in their life together.

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