Hi, I’m Ollie! After many months of deliberation I’m really excited to be finally brining FIY Wedding into the world. I can’t wait to get cracking on this new venture – with our first wedding booking being just over a week away.
Who are you?
I have a background in Digital Marketing and Ecommerce, which has included a fair bit of video editing over the years. The plan with FIY Wedding is to combine my expertise in these areas – technology, marketing and video editing, to create a cheaper way for couples to capture a brilliant video to remember their wedding by.
I got married myself in July 2022 (postponed like many, due to the pandemic). I was fully prepared for the cost of the wedding to be big, but the reality still shocked me. It seems if you add ‘wedding’ into the name of anything, the cost instantly triples!
Wedding videography was clearly no exception. I love video, and having one for our wedding was a non-negotiable for me. But the average costs blew my mind… you’re looking at £2,000+ for a quality videographer. Now I don’t mean to criticise any videographers out there – market forces dictate their prices and kudos to them for making a living doing something they love… I can empathise there! But it did get me thinking.
Whilst my initial instinct was that I needed the best video money could be, when me and my then fiancée sat down and thought about what really mattered to us, we realised this wasn’t the case.
The most important thing, was having a video that capture the essence of the day. We didn’t really care about fancy drone footage and Netflix documentary quality cut scenes. We just something personal to us, that in an instant would take us back to that special day. And so, the idea for FIY Wedding was born…
What is FIY Wedding?
FIY stands for Film It Yourself. Like DIY, but FIY – get it?
Our wedding was already very much a DIY job – we rented a barn on a farm, and my very talented wife took care of most aspects. So doing the video ourselves started to seem like a no-brainer.
The idea is, we have our guests to film parts of the day and I edit the video together myself. We could have picked a tech-savvy friend to take care of the filming, but singling out an individual seemed a bit unfair, as we didn’t want to give anyone all that stress.
So we split the day up into key parts (ceremony, welcome drinks, wedding breakfast, speeches, cake cutting, first dance, etc.) and designated different people to film each part. And this, is how the idea for FIY Wedding was born.
It was a total success, and we found that we actually captured a lot of material that a pro videographer would never have been able to (think drunk friends and family gushing about their love for us!).
And with that, I decided to bring FIY to the world. We’re offering 3 main options:
- guests use their phones to film the wedding
- you rent our video cameras for guests to use
- a combination of the two!
If you’re interested, take a look around our site and please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any questions. For the time being we’ll be offering big discounts to start building our portfolio. With that in mind, if you know anybody getting married in the next 6-12 months, please point them in my direction and I’ll be forever grateful!
