Film the whole wedding weekend, not just the day

Most wedding video starts at getting ready and ends at the last dance, because that is what coverage is priced around. But a wedding is increasingly a weekend: welcome drinks, a rehearsal, a dinner with the people who flew in, the wedding, and a slow brunch the morning after. The day itself is the most planned and most performed part of it.

The rest of the weekend is where people are least on guard. The rehearsal dinner toast is often looser and funnier than the reception one, because it is a smaller room and nobody is reading from a card yet. None of it usually gets filmed, because a crew's coverage is counted in hours on the day.

What is worth filming, event by event

• The rehearsal. Mostly for the walk-through going wrong: the officiant losing their place, the ring bearer refusing to move. Nobody performs at a rehearsal, which is exactly the point.
• The rehearsal dinner. The toasts, in full. This is the event most worth a microphone outside the ceremony itself.
• Welcome drinks. People arriving and seeing each other for the first time in years. Short clips, lots of hugs, very little that needs planning.
• The morning of. The quiet hour before anyone is dressed. It rarely makes the film and is often the part people are gladdest exists.
• The morning after. The debrief over brunch, everyone telling their version of the night before. Some of the best material of the weekend, and almost never filmed.

Why this is usually skipped

Coverage is sold in hours on one day. Our own commissioned packages are counted the same way, eight to ten hours on the wedding day, and adding the rehearsal dinner means a second booking with its own travel and minimum. For a lot of couples that is where the idea stops, and the funniest speech of the weekend goes unrecorded.

How The Loaner covers a weekend

The Loaner was built around the weekend rather than the day. The box lands three days before the wedding, and the rental window runs seven days from the wedding day, so the welcome drinks, the rehearsal dinner and the brunch are covered by default rather than as extra hours. One SD card in the single-camera kit holds the whole weekend at 4K.

If the bachelor or bachelorette weekend falls close to the wedding, or you are travelling for a destination wedding, additional rental days are $25 a day and stretch the window to cover it. It all comes back as one film and every raw clip, in the order it happened.

Making it work in practice

1. Charge everything every night. A weekend is several full days of use, and a flat battery at the rehearsal dinner is the most common way this goes wrong.
2. Hand it to a different person at each event. Whoever knows the most people in that particular room.
3. Tell them what matters at each one. Toasts at the dinner, arrivals at the drinks, nothing staged anywhere. The filmer's guide is a one-page brief you can send them.
4. Keep it off the ceremony if a professional is there, and on everything around it. The weekend is where a camcorder in a friend's hand beats a crew, because a friend is already invited.