Video guest book or audio guest book? What you actually get back

The wedding guest book has turned into a recording. Two versions have taken over: an old telephone on a table, where guests pick up the handset and leave a message after the beep, and a camera on a tripod in a corner, with a sign asking people to sit down and say something.

We edit a lot of guests talking to camcorders. It is most of what comes back from a camera passed round a reception, and it is usually the footage a film ends up built around. So this is a comparison from the edit bay, rather than from a company that rents one or the other.

What the phone gets right

• Almost everyone will do it. Nobody has to look at themselves, worry about the light or wonder what to do with their hands. Picking up a phone is a gesture every guest already knows.
• People say more to a phone. A handset feels private, so the messages come out looser and more honest, closer to a voicemail from a friend than a speech.
• It runs itself. There is nothing to frame, nothing to switch on and nothing to knock over.

What it cannot give you is a face. And it sounds like a telephone, because it is one: narrow and a little tinny, which is half its charm. If you are having a film made, ask your editor whether they will take the phone’s files too. A guest’s voice over footage of the night they are talking about can be lovely.

What the camera gets right

• Faces. The laugh halfway through a sentence, the person who gets two lines in and has to stop. A voice tells you what someone said; a face tells you what it cost them to say it.
• It can go into a film. Short messages to camera become the best part of a wedding film more often than anything else on our shot list for guests, and a booth is the most reliable way to collect them.
• It keeps the room. Whoever is behind the guest, the noise of the party and the people who wander into the back of the frame are all part of the message.

The cost is that fewer people do it. A camera on a tripod is a small stage, and the people who walk up to a small stage are the confident ones. Left alone, a video booth fills up with the loud table and misses the grandparents entirely.

How to set up a video guest book that works

1. Seat people. A chair or a small sofa, not a standing spot. Seated guests stay longer and fidget less, and two people fit in frame without anyone crouching.
2. Put the camera at seated eye height, on a tripod, framed for two with room for a third. Lower looks up noses; higher looks down on people like a security camera.
3. Light the seat from the front. A small light beside the camera, pointed at the chair, and never a bright window behind it. Faces against a bright background become silhouettes, and no edit gets them back.
4. Find the quietest corner people still walk past. Beside the speakers, every message drowns; in a separate room, nobody finds it. Just off the route between the bar and the tables is usually right.
5. Put a microphone close. The camera’s own microphone is a long way away even at a metre, and it hears the whole party. A clip-on mic fixed just in front of the seat is the difference, for the same reason the vows need one.
6. Run it from the wall if you can. A camera left recording all evening will run a battery flat, and the moment it dies is always mid-message.
7. Give it an owner. One person who brings people over, fetches the grandparents and checks the red light every twenty minutes. A booth with a host gets everyone. A booth without one gets the brave.

The prompts decide the footage

“Leave us a message” produces eighty versions of “Congratulations, love you both, have an amazing night.” Lovely to hear once and not much to watch. Specific questions get stories, and stories are what anyone rewatches. A few that work:

• How did you first meet one of us, and what did you think?
• Tell a story about one of us that the other has never heard.
• Your advice for the first year, in one sentence.
• Where will we be in ten years? Be specific.
• Say something to us on our twenty-fifth anniversary.

Print three, not ten: a long list makes people read instead of talk. And put the sign right beside the lens, so that when people glance at the questions they are glancing at the camera.

Or take the camera to them

The fixed booth is one version. The other is a camera that does a lap: one person walks the tables at the start of dinner and asks everyone the same question. It reaches the people who would never get up, and it is more or less what happens anyway when a camcorder gets passed round the reception and guests start interviewing each other.

The best evenings do both: a seat in a corner for whoever wants it, and one lap of the room with the same three questions. If the camera you have in mind is an old one, read this before you buy a vintage camcorder.

Which one to choose

• The most messages for the least fuss, mostly to listen to: the phone.
• Faces, and footage that can go into a film: the camera, with a seat, a light and an owner.
• Somebody is already filming the day: hand them the three questions and a lap of the tables, and you may not need a booth at all.
• Both: they do not compete. A phone by the door and a camera in a corner get different people saying different things.

How The Loaner covers it

Our rental is built for this as much as for the ceremony. The tall tripod, $30, is meant for exactly the seated setup above. The microphone kit, $50, packs two clip-on mics. Every camcorder kit already includes an LED fill light, and the single-camera kit is $729.

Whatever your guests say to it comes back to the same editors who cut our commissioned films. You get a 3 to 5 minute film plus every raw clip, in the order it happened, so every message survives in full, including the ones that did not make the cut.