Content Creator vs Wedding Videographer

There’s a growing trend for content creators at weddings. A content creator is someone shooting vertical video clips of your wedding (on a phone usually), to give you video to share on your socials almost immediately after the wedding. If you’re trying to work out whether to go with a content creator or videographer for your wedding, here’s my guide to the pros and cons of each and recommendations for which might be right for you.

Content Creators

Watch out for the quality

Like all things, not all content creators are quality. It’s EASY to put your phone on a cheap gimbal and take vertical video. Anyone can do it. And they are. The thing is that it might be easy to do, but it’s not necessarily easy to do well. If you’re the kind of couple who share a lot on social media, have a lot of followers , or have a lot of friends and family that are unable to attend your wedding, content creators can be a good thing, but watch out for the quality and make sure you check out the portfolio fully to assess this. Clips from content creators are usually un-edited other than to be trimmed at the start and end, so it’s quite revealing if the person wielding the gimbal hasn’t got a good eye for composition.

Cost

Cost for a content creator is significantly lower than for a wedding videographer. The content creator can be at your wedding for a couple of hours up to a full day, so you can control the budget quite well. There’s little to no editing involved, so you’re not paying for that time.

Turnaround Time

Because there’s very little editing to do, clips can be simply transferred from the phone and sent to you via an online file sharing platform such as Dropbox for you to download, very often just a day later, and sometimes even the same day. This is great for people who are desperate to get all the photo and video of their wedding back as soon as possible, and enables you to share it to your socials incredibly quickly.

Keepsake Potential

There’s no question that having clips of your wedding that are fairly smoothly shot, and covering most parts of the day, are great to have, but they have limited ability as keepsakes. For one thing they’ll all be vertical format, which is fine for viewing on a phone, but not so great otherwise. Also, all the clips are usually delivered separately – you could edit these together, but it’d take a long time, and the result would still only really be suitable for phone viewing. That might be fine with you though.

Wedding Videography / Wedding Films

Re-Live the Day

Obviously there are many types of wedding film, and lots of different videographers out there with differing styles to choose from, but all of them will give you a horizontal / landscape orientation final video suitable for watching on a bigger screen. They’ll all be edited professionally together and feature licensed music (hopefully) that will elevate the atmosphere and emotion of the footage. There’s no doubt about it, a wedding video is much more suitable for those who want to have a professionally crafted film that will allow you to re-experience the day and all the emotion.

Cost

A wedding videographer will likely be with you all day, but can also work for part of the day if you don’t want everything filmed, allowing you to control the budget more. They will need to edit the film still though, and the fee covers that time. It also covers the amount of pro gear that they have – usually a significant investment compared to a content creator with just a phone. You’ll be paying thousands rather than hundreds for this service.

Quality

Speaking of phones, the quality of phone video is getting better all the time, but it’s still no match for a professional level camera. The look of high resolution footage shot on a proper camera is not only more detailed and less grainy, but the aesthetic is totally different too, with soft blurry backgrounds and different focal lengths giving all kinds of looks you can’t really match with a phone.

Experience

A videographer will crucially be a lot more experienced than a content creator at shooting video. You should expect better composition, exposure, aesthetics, multiple angles, movement, and better audio too.

Pro Audio

Audio is half the experience! Wedding films can be crafted to include speeches and vows and other spoken parts of your day that a content creator wouldn’t usually capture. This really enhances the emotion of a film. Often you’ll also be able to order separate edits of the speeches and ceremony to watch in their entirety too. Music also plays a huge role in the emotive potential of your film, setting the mood for different parts of the day.

Turnaround Time

A wedding film can take somewhere between a couple of weeks to a few months to create, especially at busy times of the year. In my opinion this is not a bad thing. I think in a world where everything is instantaneous, it can be a really good thing to have to wait for something. You can look forward to it and enough time will have elapsed that you’re ready for your memories to be refreshed by it.

Additional Edits

Videographers often provide edits for social media too – so you can share a mini-version of your film on social media. These are often highly edited and really give an enticing flavour of your wedding. They can be provided in horizontal as well as vertical formats.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, I feel that it shouldn’t so much be a case of ‘shall we go for a content creator OR a videographer?’ – Each provides entirely different outcomes. Content creation is for social media conscious couples who value immediacy and the ability to share things online quickly. It is also more suitable for those on tight budgets. A professionally made wedding film is a high quality crafted piece of art that can allow you to re-live your wedding day in a way that nothing else can match. It’s a highly emotive, detailed and quality heirloom that you can re-watch and share, and hand on to future generations. If you have the budget, it’s a perfectly reasonable idea to go for both!