Member- glutton
- 3 years ago
Just saw the highlight video of a different wedding we attended last month (not our wedding) and it was drop dead gorgeous!! Beautifully shot, amazingly edited, perfectly captured the entire essence and emotions of their 3 day Indian wedding. They even had aerial drone footage!
I then went back and looked at a few of our own videographer’s past videos (we are having a 3-day Indian wedding as well, so I tried to watch other South Asian short films and wedding highlight videos they’ve done). While 8 months ago when I booked them, they seemed fine. Now, however, after seeing my friend’s video, I feel their style is really blah and impersonal, especially given how much we are paying.
We’ve already signed a contract so we can’t switch now unfortunately. Plus, even if we could, I’m guessing their budget was bigger than ours. Our video is costing $5,400 for 3 day coverage with 2 shooters. I don’t know exactly how much they paid for theirs, but their videographer’s website states their basic 12 hour coverage begins at $4900. So with the 3 days, drone footage, and super short turnaround time, I’m guessing they spent ~$8000? I’m also not totally positive that the videographer was local (his email address is .ca and I and the other bride are in the US), so that probably added hefty travel fees.
I don’t want to state either of our companies for fear of giving myself away, but I’m now not sure what to do :(. I’ve sent them their video for inspiration, but I’m not sure how much they would try to mimic a competitor. Since we are all putting in a shit ton of work into planning a week’s worth of events, having an awesome highlight video was really important to me. Hence, I thought by paying $5400, I was shelling out a lot more than average in order to have a product I love. But now I’m worried that I’m not going to like the end product and that I just wasted five grand, especially since they haven’t been that communicative with us. For every other vendor we’ve had multiple meetings over the past year, and I’m only having my first meeting with our videographer this week because their policy is that they only meet with clients the month before the wedding in order to “keep prices low” (even though, in my book, they aren’t exactly cheap).
I wonder…what is average? While I know that an entire wedding video rarely gets watched, I know that I would watch and cherish the 5-10 minute highlight video over and over again for years to come. What price do you put on that? How much is too much?
