After that wedding, I started thinking about more opportunities to build a videography portfolio by filming weddings. It's not that I'm necessarily looking to be a Wedding Videography, but to get any real video work it is important to have a portfolio. Weddings can be a good paycheck if I decided to pursue that more regularly, but I haven't quite made that decision.
The next thing I did was, while working on editing their video, was book more weddings. It turned out I had three weddings of friends that I was invited to that I would eventually book to be the videographer. They were all done for free (as I was just looking to build experience and happy to offer my services to friends for free), but it didn't take me long to figure out that it is in fact a lot of work and hard to do for nothing. What would prove to be the most challenging was that these three weddings took place three weekends in a row in September. They were fortunately all in the relatively same area: first one in Breckenridge (CO), second one in Albuquereque (NM) and third one in Durango (CO). I just spent a week in Denver and a week in Albuquerque in between the weddings, allowing me to spend time in the office (my day job is still located in Denver) and visit with friends in both Denver and Albuquerque.
Filming three weddings in a row was not necessarily that difficult, it was the editing that was required afterwards that would challenge me the most. Not only that, but I booked my first paid wedding in October in Georgia through the website Thumbtack.
I was able to get one of the September weddings done before the October gig, then focused on the paid job from October for the next few weeks. After completing that I focused back on the remaining September weddings. At this point now (in April), I finished the highlight films for the five weddings from 2015, and the long form videos for two of them. I still want to finish the extended videos on two from September, and finally I just filmed another friend wedding in Denver over Easter weekend.
Once these are all completed, it's time to start deciding if I want to continue or not. I think realistically at this point I'm not going to quit my engineering career to become a Wedding Videographer. I've been thinking if I could book 3-5 a year that would be a nice way to make a little extra money while continuing to develop my skills and build my portfolio. In the meantime, if you're interested in checking out the wedding highlight videos (and all previous videos I've done), please head to my YouTube link below.
https://www.youtube.com/user/smuckuss