On the last Saturday of July, we had the pleasure of filming the wedding of Katie and Mark at Wakehurst Place in Sussex. They could not have chosen a better day, for the first time in July we could actully say it was a gorgeous summer day! Both the house and the gardens at Wakehurst Place made for a gorgeous setting and Katie, the coordinator, made sure their wedding day was just perfect. Katie and Mark had chosen to have a humanist wedding ceremony, which was a pleasure to attend and film. Vivienne Donnithorne, the celebrant, had designed the ceremony together with Katie and Mark. The result was a truly personal and touching ceremony during which you really got to know the couple.

During the day we worked alongside Martin Briggs, who was a true pleasure to work with. He even noticed our gorgeous collection of vintage lenses. His quirky sense of humour meant we had a lot fun in the down time as well. Our couple was quite adventurous which resulted in a couple of great and unusual shots. Sylvia especially loved the purple Converse shoes that Katie brought along for the evening party.

Here’s a little taster of the day:

We took our first trip ever from Sheffield down to Cornwall for the wedding of Kahdine of Charles. A ceremony at the idyllic little church of St Uny and a reception at Gonwin Manor on a cliff top overlooking the sea.

Kahdine looked gorgeous in her Caroline Castigliano dress and Jimmy Choo shoes (lucky girl!) and Charles was equally handsome and luckily not worse for wear after celebrating his 30^th birthday the night before the wedding. The whole event for been meticulously organised by the wonderful planners at Wedding Matters and went off without a hitch, despite the windy weather making the set up of the marquee rather tricky. During the wedding breakfast Kahdine and Charles surprised their guest with a performance by singing waiters; as ever highly entertaining. In the evening, the entertainment was provided by the fabulous and very energetic Riverbrew band. And later on there was yet another surprise for the guests: fireworks overlooking the bay. We were also lucky enough to work alongside Allister Freeman, not only is he a joy to work with, he takes some rather stunning photographs too.

So without further ado, here are Kahdine and Charles wedding highlights

Ceremony venue: St Uny Church, Lelant

Reception venue: Gonwin Manner

Wedding Dress: Caroline Castigliano

Wedding Planner: Wedding Matters

Photography: Allister Freeman Photography

Michael Buble Tribute Act: Max Hutton

Singing Waiters: Waiters Encore

Band: Riverbrew

Close up Magician: Stephen Karl Magic

Fireworks: Celebration Pyrotechnics

And as ever, we always appreciate your lovely comments

On Saturday we were down in Ascot at the brand new Coworth Park for the wedding of Sarah and Gareth. And what a wedding it was! First of all the setting at Coworth Park is amazing, a beautiful mansion house and stunning gardens. Then there’s the marquee where the wedding breakfast and party took place, which is quite grand too. But the way it was all decorated made it really stand out, the eventplanners at TLC did an amazing job. The flower arrangements, I’m not sure you can actually still call them just flower “arrangements”, were out of this world, exquisite!

Then there were the people. Sarah and Gareth, what a lovely couple they were. After 9 years of being together they finally tied the knot. They booked us based upon the recommendation of their friends Laura and Ken whose wedding we filmed 2 years before. There was a delightful personalised reading by bridesmaid Hannah and the 2 best men had a memorable double act going for their speech. Then there was the friendliest staff at Coworth Park; Declan the hairdresser who stayed all day making sure the bride’s and bridesmaids’ hair looked gorgeous at all times; the incredible string quartet Siren and a fabulously fun band in the evening; the photographer Kevin Wilson who we also worked with at Laura and Ken’s wedding and is great to work with; finally there was David Collins, the marvelous toastmaster who made the run smoothly.

But for me, the most memorable thing about this wedding will probably be the record time in which I had to do a Same Day Edit. The schedule was always going to be tight, but manageable, with a screening originally planned at about 9pm. However, things were running ahead of schedule and the coordinator wanted a screening closer to 8pm. That was impossible, so with a little gentle persuasion, we agreed on 8.30pm. I managed to get the edit done in 1h50 (I actually spent 10 minutes of that time running back and forth between the mansion house and the marquee to get some extra sound bites for the video), which is a record for me, usually I get about an hour more. The Same Day Edit was screened at 8.25pm! Laughter, tears and a standing ovation! Success!

Video: Ever After

Venue: Coworth Park

Photographer: Kevin Wilson

Event Planners: TLC

String Quartet: Siren

Toastmaster: David Collins

and more information please visit our website www.everaftervideos.com

Last Saturday we were down in London for the wedding of Rachel and Andrew. There were some rumours floating around that the world might end that day, but this was going to stop Rachel and Andy from thoroughly enjoying their day. I was just thinking, the world better not end before I show their Same Day Edit!

The day turned out to be gloriously sunny, which all the guests managed to benefit from during drinks reception out in the gardens of Warren House. We had never filmed a wedding before at Warren House and I must say, it is quite a delightful venue: beautiful house, pretty gardens and ever so friendly staff. The venue wasn’t the only delight of the day for us. We got to work together with the fabulous Nikole Ramsay, who unfortunately for the UK wedding market is moving back to Australia very soon (this was her last UK wedding). In the morning I was also pleased to see hair and make-up artist Pam Wrigley again too. We had worked together a few years ago at a few weddings and not only is she wonderful at her job, she’s also such a lovely person too.

At the meeting we had with Rachel and Andy before the wedding, Rachel told us she liked the Bruno Mars song “Just the way you are” and I also found out that they were both rather fond of Glee. Well, I’m a bit of self-confessed Gleek too, so I finally had the perfect excuse to use a Glee song for the Same Day Edit.

Wedding Dress: Sassi Holford

Venue: Warren House, Kingston

Photographer: Nikole Ramsay

Hair & Make-up: Pam Wrigley

Close-up Magician: Mark Williams

London Bus Company: London Heritage Travel

For more London wedding videos and more information please visit our website www.everaftervideos.com

Posting a new video on the blog is long overdue, so let me take you back to last summer. Ringwood Hall Hotel in Chesterfield was the gorgeous setting of Kate and Karl’s wedding. From a first meeting, more than a year prior to their wedding, Kate and Karl described their wedding as a bit unusual and they did not dissappoint. Although on the surface it seemed like a regular wedding day, the unusual sound bits we picked up as well the unique sax-solo instead of the traditional string quartet set the tone for this day filled with fun and enjoyment.
While getting some shots before the start of the ceremony, a familiar face appeared in my viewfinder: one of our friends from Sylvia’s university days. When we heard he knew the groom from his MA in Filmstudies, we immediately understood his eclectic, unusual and remarkably similar taste in films. No extra pressure there then! Kate looked stunning and even Karl, who claims not be a romantic, clearly had a moment when she appeared. We got some great footage and really enjoyed working with Ryane Browne, the photographer of the day. You can see some the pictures he took on his blog. In the evening everyone enjoyed a great barbeque and the rather  ‘funky dance moves’ of Karl!  Won’t easily forget those…
So please take a moment and enjoy this lovely summer’s wedding from Ringwood Hall.

Back in September we received an email from a couple, Andi and Elizabeth, in Singapore looking for someone to do an engagement shoot in Europe. As they are from South East Asia, they are pretty much spoiled for choice over there when it comes to amazing event filmmakers, luckily for us they found us thanks to EventDV.
The options for shooting locations were Paris or Vienna. Now Vienna is my favourite city in the world (contrary to popular believe, it isn’t Orlando) so I was eager to to convince the couple of Vienna’s beauty. Since they were looking for a more Christmassy atmosphere for the video and the fact that the photographer was already meeting them in Paris, it was an easy sell. Queue a small script being written, a bunch of emails back and forward and before we knew it, our tickets to Vienna were ordered, the shoot in Vienna would be on 21 December.

Fast forward to Saturday 18 December, snow descents on the United Kingdom, traffic in the country comes to a standstill and most flights from London Heathrow airport are cancelled. We are due to fly early on Sunday morning (we were going to drive down on Saturday). We anxiously listened to every news update, followed British Airways and Heathrow Airport on Twitter for any last minute updates. Things only went from bad to worse. Around 4pm on Saturday afternoon we received an email from British Airways to inform us that our flight was cancelled. Panic! How were we going to get to Vienna?!? Earlier in the day I had already been looking at options of driving down, but this would be a hopeless mission as traffic throughout France and Germany was possibly even worse than in the UK due the snow there. Trains? Again, frozen rails in Germany put a stop to that option. So at 4pm on Saturday we are faced with a dilemma, give up or find another way?

Another quick search on the internet and I found an option to get to Vienna via Brussels Airport, which hadn’t succumbed to the snow yet. This would mean a drive down from Sheffield to Dover, get on a ferry, drive partly through France and into Belgium. OK, we can do this! New flight booked for Sunday afternoon, jumped in the car with plenty of food and blankets and drove down to Dover. This drive normally takes us about 4 hours, this time it was 8. Then 2 hours on the ferry and a 2 hour drive to Brussels. Luckily my parents live just outside of Brussels, so we had a quick stopover there for a quick bite and quick shower. But the snow wasn’t far behind us. As we arrived at Brussels Airport, the first snowflakes started falling. This was not good news! We still had 3 hours until our flight, surely, it wouldn’t be a problem. Right? No. Because you see, an inch of snow in Brussels and everything grinds to a slow and painful halt.

Our 3pm flight got cancelled , luckily the airline staff managed to book us on a later flight, at 6.30pm. But the weather really wasn’t on our side, flight after flight got cancelled, less than 1 in 10 flights took off from the airport. 6.30pm came and went and our flight still wasn’t cancelled, but delayed, and delayed again and delayed again. Around 9pm, as if by miracle, we boarded the plane! At that point I assumed that it would soon start snowing again and the runway wouldn’t be clear. It wasn’t until we were up in the air, that I actually believed we were going to Vienna. We finally arrived at our hotel in Vienna at 12.30am, after travelling for 30 hours without sleep or a proper meal.

It wasn’t just us trying to get to Vienna… Andi and Elizabeth were struggling too and wondering if they were going to make it. The whole of Europe was suffering from the snow and it had affected their travel plans too. But they made and we made it. Phew!

On Monday we went on a scouting mission through Vienna, we’d been a few years before so knew the city pretty well, but as we were relying on public transport we needed to make sure of the most efficient routes. That day was absolutely beautiful, clear blue skies, glistening snow all around Vienna (somehow they can manage snow in Austria…).

The day of the shoot… Mist… Fog… Mist… Our first location was the park of the gorgeous Schonbrunn Palace, as we entered the park, we said “you’ll soon see this amazing palace”. Well, they didn’t, not until they got really close to it, which made it a nice surprise actually. But we had to revise our schedule as we had planned to do shoots at certain locations in the park which required the view of the palace and another setting which was now out of reach. A snowball fight took care of that disappointment, especially as Elizabeth had never done one! We took Elizabeth and Andi to all the most important sites in Vienna. In the meantime we were also their tour guides for the day. This was something they luckily really appreciated as even though they’d travelled to Paris and Prague earlier in the trip, they didn’t manage to see much of the cities. Our shoot was designed to make the most out of their short stay in Vienna. When I heard her say “I like Vienna better than Paris” I knew my mission was accomplished.

With the shoot over, Niels and I still had until Friday to enjoy Vienna. Friday being Christmas Eve, and a flight due home that evening. In case you’re wondering: yep snowfall affected that journey as well, but that’s a whole different story.
Anyway, we are making 2 clips for the couple. The first is a small trailer/save the date video. The other is a video to be screened at their wedding in Bali.

If you’ve managed to read through all this, I applaud you. Feel free to watch Elizabeth and Andi’s Save the Date…

Elizabeth & Andi – Save the Date from EverAfterVideos on Vimeo.

 
To find out more about our wedding videos, please visit our website.

I’ve been neglecting the blog again, haven’t I? The last month has been super hectic and I find myself wondering what has happened to 2011 so far. I can’t believe it is mid March already!

Anyway, time to look at some more gorgeous weddings. Up this time are Olivia and James. Their wedding was the 3^rd wedding we’ve filmed in this family, so we knew we were in for a good time. Olivia and James live in London, but made it back to Olivia’s family home in Sheffield for the wedding, with a ceremony at Christ Church Fulwood and a reception at Thornbridge Hall in the middle of the Peak District in Derbyshire.

Now one of the things that I’ll definitely remember this wedding for is Olivia’s father. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a father of the bride so happy and so proud. It was truly quite heartwarming.

I’d also like to give a quick shout out to Rob Berry who was the photographer on the day. But as a good friend of the bride and groom, he was at times busy being a wedding guest so he roped in the help from Jaz Ampaw-Farr. Both were an absolute joy to work with and you should really go check out their work!

And I promise, I won’t take quite so long to post on the blog again. I’ve already got a few lovely little films lined up to share with you over the next few weeks! But if you can’t wait, our Ever After Facebook page usually gets first dibs at all our clips (some are even exclusively on the Facebook page). So make sure you “like” us there too.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love my job? It really must be one of the best of jobs in the world. Couples let me be a part of the happiest day in their lives, and I get to make an amazing keepsake of the memories they will never want to forget. Plus, it also takes me to places all over the world.

Speaking of which, last month we were in Florida, not for a vacation, but to cover a wedding, Susan and Michael’s wedding. They decided to book our services based on the recommendation of one of our former brides Annie, always lovely when that happens. They flew us out to Saint Augustine for their wedding at the Cathedral Basilica, the oldest parish in the US. We knew Susan as Annie’s  bridesmaid, we’d been chatting with her on Facebook for a few months now and meeting up with her the day before the wedding felt more like meeting up with an old friend rather than with a “client”. We were kindly invited to the rehearsal dinner where we got to meet the whole family who were all so lovely and welcoming.

The day of the wedding was a rather cold day in Florida, sadly somewhat overcast too, but that didn’t dampen any of the spirits. As their first date, Michael took Susan on plane ride. So Susan thought it would be a great idea if Michael would go out to the airport and fly over St Augustine. Niels was lucky enough to join him on the plane. Meanwhile, Susan was getting ready at her mum’s house. Everything went like clockwork, no panics, no delays, quite unusual really. Susan even arrived early at the church! After a lovely ceremony, with a great sermon by father Ryan, everyone went down to White Room to celebrate the night away.

The next morning, at 9am, Susan and Mike were up and dressed in their wedding attire again as we were taking them on a bit of stroll around St Augustine. That morning the sun came out and brought out all the beautiful colours of St Augustine. It was lovely having some relaxing time with just the two of them without the rush of the wedding day and the images we got as a result are amazing.

I could keep babbling on about this wedding,  but as they say, an image is worth a thousand words, well, this being a short little teaser, it should say even more!

Happy Valentine’s Day

Notable mentions go to

The photographers Mark and Joi – www.mark-brian.com

The Venue: The White Room, St Augustine – www.ocwhiteroom.com

The Church: Cathedral Basilica of St Augstine – www.thefirstparish.org

The On-the-Day Coordinator: Jennifer of 1-877-Le Concierge www.1877leconcierge.com

And considering it’s Valentine’s Day, we also have an offer on for new bookings (must book by next Monday). If you’re curious to find out more about it, just get in touch!

Time to announce the winners of our Best of 2010 Competition.

For 2 weeks in January we ran a competition to find the Best Wedding Video of 2010. It’s been fun seeing votes come in for all the couples and sharing the updates on the Ever After Facebook page (make sure you join us there to stay updated with everything we do). Most of the time, the votes were extremely close.  The last few days of the competition, it kept alternating between 2 couples, but now the polls have closed and we can reveal the winners.

In 1^st place with the most overall votes are Helena and Daniel! They will be receiving a £200 John Lewis Gift Voucher.

In 2^nd place, the wedding film receiving the most comments, are Carole & Neil! They will be receiving a £75 Amazon Gift Card soon.

We’ve also sent an email to one lucky voter who’ll be receiving a £25 Amazon Gift Card. Thank you to everybody who has voted! We’ll be holding another competition this time next year. We’ll get that contest started with Susan and Mike’s wedding film trailer filmed in St Augustine,Florida last month. Stay tuned, it will go live on this blog soon!

From all of us here at Ever After, we want to wish you a Happy 2011 and say a big thank you for continuing to follow our work!
A new year is now here and we’d like to take a moment and invite you to look back with us at the year that just ended. Our blog has featured quite a few wedding films in the past 12 months and we’d love to find out which ones were your favourites.

So for the next 2 weeks we’ll be running a short survey (until 31 January) to find the best clip of 2010! You’ll find a link to vote at the bottom of this post, please feel free to tell us what made you vote for these clips. We will update our facebook page periodically with the status of the survey so keep watching our facebook site for updates.

We ARE awarding prizes.
1st Place goes to the couple that receives the most overall votes. They will receive a £200 John Lewis Gift Voucher!
2nd Place goes to the couple whose film receives the most comments! They will receive a £75 Amazon Gift Certificate. So tell all your friends to comment!
And finally, we’re also giving a £25 Amazon Gift Certificate to one lucky voter!

Enjoy the clips and have fun voting!

THE 2010 EVER AFTER FILMS AWARDS NOMINEES!!

Based on the total number of views in the first 2 weeks of their blog appearance, the following six films are all in the running for the Best Film Award:

Click here to vote!

Tina & Joshua

Lauren & Nikki

Carole & Neil

Emma & James

Helena & Daniel

Donna & John

Click here to vote!