Camera-shy, and booking a wedding video anyway

If you have been putting off booking a videographer because you cannot stand watching yourself on camera, you are in good company, and you are probably picturing the wrong film. The dread is usually a day of being directed and watched. A wedding film made the documentary way is mostly people who have forgotten the camera is there, and that includes the couple.

What you are actually picturing

It is usually one specific image: standing in a field being told to look at each other, then to laugh, then to walk slowly towards a lens. That exists, and some films are built on it. In ours it is a short, organised block of about twenty minutes in a long day, and it is the easiest part of the day to shrink.

The rest is filmed the way a documentary is. The camera goes where something is about to happen and waits. You are talking to friends, crying at your vows, being hugged by an aunt. Nobody is performing, because nobody has the time. What documentary actually means in wedding video is the longer version, and worth reading if the word has started to sound like marketing.

A surprising amount of the film is not you at all. The speeches are other people talking about you. The reception is your guests. The minutes couples come back to are often a best friend's toast or a grandparent on the dance floor, and in those you are the person laughing at the edge of the frame.

Why you look and sound wrong to yourself

Two pieces of research explain most of the cringe, and both are reassuring once you know them.

The face first. The version of your face you know best is the one in the mirror, which is flipped. A camera shows you unflipped, the way everyone else has always seen you, and because no face is perfectly symmetrical it looks subtly off. In a 1977 study, women shown both versions of their own photograph mostly preferred the mirrored one, while their friends and partners preferred the true one. The face that looks wrong to you is the one the people who love you prefer.

Then the voice. Part of the reason is physical: you hear yourself partly through the bones of your own head, which adds a low warmth nobody else hears, so a recording sounds thinner and higher than the voice you know. Psychologists have studied the discomfort of hearing your own recorded voice since the 1960s, and it is very common. Everyone else has always heard something much closer to the microphone's version.

Neither reaction disappears, but both fade with watching. The first viewing is the one that stings. Watch it once with someone else, and watch it twice before you decide anything about it.

What you can opt out of

Tell your videographer before the day, in writing, and a good one will plan around it. All of these are reasonable requests:

• The sit-down interview. Some styles lean on one. If yours would, ask whether letters read aloud to each other, or simply your vows, can carry the words instead.
• Most of the directed portraits. The block can be a few minutes, and walking somewhere together is easier than standing still being looked at.
• Slow-motion close-ups of your face. Ask for wider coverage of the moments you are most self-conscious about. A wide shot of a first dance is often the better shot anyway, because it has the room in it.
• Getting ready. If a camera in the room while you dress sounds unbearable, the film can start at the ceremony.
• Anything public. You can ask that nothing from your wedding is posted anywhere. Put it in the contract.

The one thing not to opt out of is the microphone. Being heard matters far more than how you look, and recording the vows properly costs almost nothing and asks nothing of you beyond a small clip on a lapel.

What makes it easier on the day

• Have something to do. Walking, holding a drink, talking about anything. Nobody looks natural standing still being watched; everybody looks natural in the middle of a conversation.
• Talk to each other, not to the lens. The camera is filming the two of you, not interviewing you. If you are looking at your partner, you are already doing it right.
• Expect the first twenty minutes to feel stiff. Anyone who films people for a living knows the start of every session is the warm-up, and plans to use the end of it.
• Fewer, smaller cameras change a room less. One person with a small camera is easier to forget than a crew with cinema rigs, which is worth weighing when you decide whether you need a second camera at all. A camcorder passed between your friends changes the room least of all, because a friend is supposed to be there, and it is half of why guest-filmed footage catches people looking like themselves.
• Meet whoever is filming before the day, even on a call. It is much easier to ignore a camera held by someone you already know. The questions worth asking include how they work with couples who would rather not be directed.

If you would still rather not

That is a real choice, and plenty of couples make it. If you skip a videographer, at least get the ceremony recorded as sound; nobody has to be on camera for that, and the vows are the part most worth keeping. A video or audio guest book collects your guests' voices without you being filmed at all, and photo or video, if you can only pay for one is the honest comparison.