I’m here with the immensely talented Henry Martens of The Brothers Martens, half of the brothers as it were, and today we’re watching the first wedding he ever filmed.
If you’ve seen his work you know the style: dramatic, dark, moody, the kind of thing that demands your attention. So where did that begin? What are his origins?
Neither of us has watched this all the way through. He skimmed it beforehand just to check whether it was as bad as he thought it was going to be. “Yes it is.”
The Opening
Just like me, he starts off with a white screen and then a fade in. You know, that’s what really elevates it.
Then the longest lens flare you can find for free online. Do you have to reverse it at some point? “Oh crap, it’s too short, I need to double it up, keep the lens flare going.”
Then the date. Literally dating the video. And then a pan that goes, zoop, oh, oh wait, hold on, wait, okay, close enough. There’s no control at all. It’s just, meh, and then maybe I’ll pan over here, and there’s your coverage.
The White Balance
Let’s just talk about this white balance real quick. I see you’re going for the teal and orange look. With the dress.
“Honestly, I didn’t know what white balance was. I was filming this wedding and I had no idea the functionality of white balance.”
And later on it gets better, or worse, because there’s one white balance over here and a completely different white balance over there. It’s a work of art, this thing.
What He Shot It On
Here’s the part that gets me. He shot his first wedding on a Blackmagic 2.5K Cinema Camera. In RAW. About 980 gigabytes of it.
And still didn’t get the white balance right. “I even did it in post and I still couldn’t fix it, because I didn’t even know what I was doing.”
There’s also the original Blackmagic Pocket in there, and then a Canon 5D Mark II, which you can spot instantly because the whole image jumps from super contrasty to, as I put it at the time, a funeral. Completely desaturated. “But I didn’t know what contrast was, so…”
Nobody knows what contrast is. We still don’t know. Here we are.
He also had a slider and a tripod, which you can clearly tell. “I was prepared gear-wise for my first wedding. Didn’t know how to actually use it. But I did it.”
And then there’s this shot. There’s a cello in there somewhere. I know because there was a violin shot before it, otherwise I would have no idea what I’m looking at. Shot on a 50mm at f/1.2, so dark that I turned the brightness up on the screen and still could barely find the instrument.
“At least I knew to set context for what you’re going to be looking at. Wide and tight. That’s not bad.”
He Had Never Been To A Wedding
This is my favorite part of the whole thing.
He’d been at the venue three hours before the ceremony, getting prep shots, thinking he was killing it. And then it dawns on him that the ceremony is in about an hour and a half.
“I’ve never been to a wedding. Besides the first kiss, I literally have no idea what’s about to happen.”
He didn’t even think to search for it. He just thought, oh yeah, I’ll get some killer makeup shots, and then a wedding will just occur. Whatever that is.
So he called his brother, who was at the pool, and who had been a wedding photographer for a lot longer. He threw on some clothes, brought his 5D and his L-series glass, and showed up.
His Brother’s Shots
And you can tell. You can genuinely tell, shot by shot, who filmed what. His brother’s stuff is stable, it’s in focus, the coverage is there. Henry’s is not.
His own summary is the best line in the video: “Let’s just say that my shots were so bad that even not having any idea what I was doing to edit, I still chose not to use them.”
Which is actually a real skill, and I said so at the time. You don’t know what’s good yet, but you know what’s bad, and you look at your own footage and go, this, bad. Justifiably.
There was also a safety angle on a tripod at the ceremony, which was good to see. And then it disappears from the film entirely. “I lost that angle. I don’t know where it went.” Side footage is gone, who knows where, please don’t ask about it, it’s fine.
The Jib
Then a shot at the reception rises up, smoothly, and I assume it’s a slider.
It is a seven foot jib. He is sitting in the corner of the dance floor at his first wedding, with a tripod and a seven foot jib.
Forget close-ups. Forget a gimbal. Forget movement. Straight to jib, straight to Hollywood. And honestly, I like the angle, it’s a great shot, I have no complaints. Except that it was shot in 2.5K and delivered in 720p.
“But they were the right colors to me.”
Everything In Slow Motion
Eventually a slow motion shot arrives, and it made me realise something about his work now: it’s all slow motion. Why would anything be at normal speed?
“To this day most of my work is still slow-mo, but I’ve gotten a little better at how you edit it.”
And here’s the genuinely useful thing that came out of it. Because his films are so heavily slowed down, the moment the music drops at the reception and he goes to real time, it feels enormously fast by contrast. People have told him he was speeding his reception edits up. He wasn’t. It was just real time.
“I’ve just drowned you with four and a half minutes of slow-mo, so now it feels fast.”
That’s worth being aware of in your own edits. Is your audience getting too used to the frame rate you’ve been showing them? Surprise them. Do something crazy. Play something at normal speed.
The Logo
The film ends on the couple’s names with an exclamation point after them, which, given that his brand today is very serious and very dramatic, is genuinely wonderful. It’s that yell. The exclamation.
“Let’s be real, there was no brand.”
He was operating as Henry Weddings, a name he used for many years, and the logo came about like this: he was about to deliver the film, realised he didn’t have a logo card, thought, what should I call my company? H slash W. Photoshop. Save As. Done.
And people told him they loved the simplicity. “Yeah. Totally.”
It’s truly a work of art, and I’m very impressed by it. I think he has a bright future in wedding filmmaking. He should probably continue doing it.
You can find Henry on YouTube at The Brothers Martens and on Instagram.
And if you want to see me get the same treatment, I sat down and watched my own first wedding film from 2010. Striped shirt, khakis, Converse, and a cross dissolve between every single shot.
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