Wedding Films to Remember Lost Loved Ones

I never believe in selling someone on video who doesn’t need it. We here at SkipperFilms want to provide a service for people that see the value in what we do long before we explain it to them. We’ve been doing Wedding Videography and video production in the Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland area for years, and most of our wonderful brides and grooms come to us through referrals, so it never feels forced. If they want Video production for their wedding, they come to us, if they don’t, no big deal. And I’ve always had my spiel about how your wedding day is over in the blink of an eye, and it’s nearly impossible to fully process everything that happens without a video to help you remember, but very recently, our presence at a wedding became so much more meaningful…

Cathy and John came to us in the Spring of 2015 to capture their wedding months later. They wanted to remember the fun times, relive the vows, and reminisce over the fun they will surely have. The wedding was beautiful, the love was overflowing, and they were overjoyed with their wedding film in the end. But a little less than a year later, Cathy’s father suddenly passed. Now, I’m facebook friends with them (as I am with all my brides, grooms, sometimes even mothers and fathers of the couple too!), so I saw this all as it unfolded, and it affected me in a big way. I knew Dave (Cathy’s Father), I talked to him at the wedding, we spoke on the phone after the wedding, he gave me some of the greatest compliments about the wedding film I’ve ever received. So this hit me too. But as far as friends and family go, I’m an outsider to them, and it wouldn’t have been appropriate to offer anything more than my condolences via facebook comment, but great wedding vendors really connect with the families they serve, and I’m sure I felt more like family than they considered me. The way they treated me was probably normal for nice people such as themselves, but I saw it was a wonderful gesture J

Feeling like I needed to help but not knowing how, I finally realized that I possess some of the last pieces of footage with some of the last recorded words Dave ever said. I dropped everything I was doing that day to pull up the project from last year, and proceeded to pull every clip I could find that had his face in it. I know the feeling of wanting to see someone’s face, and hear their voice just one last time. It didn’t matter what the clip was, or if half of it was out of focus, it all mattered. I took his speech, mixed with clips of him walking Cathy down the aisle, dancing, having fun with is beautiful wife, and ultimately ended on the father-daughter dance he shared with Cathy. It was to the song “My Girl” by They Temptations, and I thought it was such a fun moment at the time when the entire wedding started singing along as they danced, but in it’s current circumstance, it became one of the sweetest moments that dragged the tears from my eyes while I edited this short tribute to the life of a great man. I didn’t tell them I was doing this, so when I delivered it to Cathy and her Mom, and they got to experience Dave once again, they couldn’t have been more grateful. It didn’t take me long, I didn’t charge them for it, and it wasn’t a cinematic masterpiece by any stretch of the word, but it was Dave, and it gave them one more glance into the happy times they had with him.