Today I would like to invite you back to Iceland again for more adventures with me and Rachel, as we film gorgeous landscapes with the DJI Mavic and Sony A7Sii. If you are planning on traveling to Iceland soon (or anywhere else for that matter), and are needing inspiration for how to create a travel film, I hope this vlog helps you.
Also, I would like to give a massive thank you to my wife Rachel. When I posted the first part of this BTS, the most common comment I received was, “You’re really lucky to have a wife that lets you drive around and film pretty stuff!” And it’s true! I’m incredibly happy that her idea of a good time is riding around in a car with me as we look at and film pretty things.
😃As always, if you have any questions or comments about this travel video, please feel free to leave one below, or get in touch.
If you’ve been following my channel for a bit, you’ve probably noticed how many wedding films and trailers I upload. That’s due to wedding filmmaking being my full-time job! As I’ve been creating tutorials and reviews to help you, I’ve been considering how I can turn some of these wedding films into educational material to help you as a filmmaker, and I had an idea: what if I created behind-the-scenes videos for some of my favorite wedding films?
Now this doesn’t mean hopping in a Delorean and going back in time to bring along a third shooter to act as BTS cameraman for my prior films, but what it does mean is I am wanting to revisit some of my favorite films and discuss certain aspects of them. In this case, my good friends Zac and Lindsey’s wedding trailer.
In this video, I’ll go through and explain my thought process for how I edited it this way, and offer a key takeaway that took me many years to learn. If this helps you, could you please leave me a comment and let me know if you would like to see more videos like this in the future? Thanks!
I’m required to state that I’m a part of affiliate programs for Amazon, B&H, SoundStripe, ArtList, Musicbed, and Adobe and that some of the links above are affiliate links.
This week I had the opportunity to not only be on a podcast, but host it! My good friend Jordan Bunch, the regular host of The Wedding Film Academy Podcast (which I was on back in March), reached out to me about interviewing him about a topic that I didn’t know much about: volume wedding film brands. Usually he runs the show but in this case, considering he wanted to talk about his own company, we decided it would be a great idea to have me ask the questions.
There are many ways to run a wedding film business, and one of the most interesting is the concept of a volume company – one that films hundreds of weddings per year, usually at a lower cost than competitors. To hear Jordan describe it, his company Ladybird Wedding Films is the Toyota of wedding filmmakers: cheap, reliable, and with good gas mileage (not sure about that last one in regards to wedding films). Because he runs this company very differently than how I run FilmStrong Productions, I ended up having a ton of questions about everything from video quality to business sustainability. I would highly recommend checking out the podcast on Jordan’s site or on iTunes if you would like to learn more about different styles of wedding filmmaking businesses.
Have any questions? Please feel free to get in touch!
As promised in my Mavic Pro Review video, I’m excited to share with you my favorite picture profile for the Mavic Pro. This is the exact picture profile that I use for filming weddings, travel videos, and any other professional shoots. With a bit of color grading, I find that it can result in some beautiful footage shot with this tiny drone.
In the future, I plan on bringing you a video dedicated to exactly how I use Adobe Premiere Pro to color grade the footage shot with this exact picture profile, and how I use LUTs with it as well.
For now though, here are my exact picture profile settings:
My favorite Mavic Pro picture profile: D-Log 0, -1,-1 (unless I’m filming in a high-dynamic-range scenario, then I want my sharpness set to +1.
Other settings that I use in the DJI Go App:
Record in Manual
Record in the MP4 Video Format
Record in 4K at 30fps, conformed in post to 24fps.
Record at 1/60th shutter speed by using Polar Pro’s Cinema Series Vivid Collection of ND Filters with Polarizers.
Turn the Over Exposure Warning (aka Zebras) ON, and make sure no parts of my video are overexposed.
Monitor the EV Meter and try to ALWAYS keep my exposure at 0.0 or slightly above at .3 or .7, never under 0.0 (note that this is bugged in my current version of the firmware and the EV does not work, so I monitor my zebras instead and film with my footage just below where the zebras start to appear, almost over-exposed.)
Manually set my White Balance using the “Custom” option and dialing in the exact Kelvin value. In most daylight/partly cloudy situations this is at 7,000K.
Keep my ISO at 100 if possible.
If you are wondering why I use these settings, please watch the video, because two-thirds of it is dedicated to explaining why I use them.
Now that you’ve done that, have you ever wanted to know how I film a wedding? I am so HUGELY EXCITED to share this video with you and it has been so hard to keep this a secret! I had a behind-the-scenes filmed of a real wedding that I filmed! This video will show you:
The gear I use to film a wedding.
Gobs of drone flying action!
My thought process behind creative shots.
How I handle things when a wedding reception nearly ends in disaster!
The exact lenses and camera settings I use in different situations.
I’ve been wanting to make this video for about a year and a half (ever since my first wedding filmmaker vlog!), so when my friend Noah told me he was getting married and asked me to film, I jumped at the chance to bring along my friend Paul Bailey and have him film a behind-the-scenes of Rachel and I as we filmed this wedding.
And just so we are clear, this is ONLY a behind the scenes of the wedding trailer, I have a much longer behind-the-scenes coming out soon, walking you through the ENTIRE wedding day from beginning to end. 🙂
And if you want to keep up with my Iceland photos, videos, and other behind-the-scenes stuff, follow me on Instagram. I also post a ton of video related things to my Facebook Page.
Shoutout to Grant Daniels Photography too for photographing this wedding and giving some great commentary in this video!
You can check out the rest of the gear I use for filmmaking at my Gear Page or my Kit Page.
I am also now offering one-on-one personal filmmaker consulting! Wanna talk about cameras, lighting, or booking clients? Let’s do it!
