Guide to Hiring the Right Indian Wedding Videographer
Indian wedding videographers come in all shapes and sizes and their finished product can be vastly different from one videographer to the next. This is amplified by the fact that Indian weddings run for multiple days which gives videographers much more opportunity to shape and stylise your film with the particular imagery that they feel is important to capture.

This guide is here to help you think about what is important to you, and subsequently what type of videographer will help capture your celebrations in the light you’re looking for.
Indian wedding videographers can generally be put into 3 main categories. How they see themselves as videographers and what they feel their role is, will determine what kind of wedding video you’ll get back.
1: The Event Videographer
This type of videographer will record everything for you. For as long as the event runs, they will be there recording every moment. This is great for couples (and sometimes their parents) that want to have an objective record of all the events that happened throughout the wedding. The final delivered wedding video is often 3-5 hours in length with very little editing involved. The events captured are often presented in chronological order. Day 1, Day2, Day 3 etc.
Common Reaction: “It’s great to have a record of what events happened and who attended our wedding.”
2: The Cinematic Videographer
In recent years, the evolution of modern camera technology has opened up a whole new genre of filmmaking for videographers. Drones, gimbals and mirrorless cameras with photo-quality lenses have meant wedding videos have evolved to become beautifully crafted masterpieces. A talented videographer knows how to use these tools to create wedding films that sometimes rival the look of those made in Bollywood.
The videographer will see your day through the lens of ‘what looks amazing‘. They’ll work to create striking composition and dynamic moving shots. Given Indian weddings are full of colour, culture and energy, this is a cinematic videographers playground.
Often cinematic videographers will take a more active role in directing the bride and groom during the photoshoot. This gives them the ability to create cool looking shots to place throughout the film adding to the impressive cinematic style of the films
Effect over Affect:
The Cinematic Videographer can be summarised by prioritising Effect over Affect. Their main goal is to make an amazing looking film. Their tool box often include Effects such as noticeable camera movement, drones, fancy transitions between shots, slow motion and footage cut in-sync with strong music.
Common Reaction: “Wow, your wedding looked amazing. What a beautiful day”.
3: The Storytelling Videographer
Surprisingly, the Storytelling Videographer shares the same base motivations as the Event Videographer. Their goal is to accurately and comprehensively capture what took place during your Indian wedding. Where the two differ is by the lens they look through.
The Event Videographer records your wedding day through an objective lens. They document all of the guests, what saree’s they were wearing, what the decorations looked like and the events that transpired.
The Storytelling Videographer records your wedding day through a subjective lens. Their goal is to accurately and comprehensively capture how it felt to be at your wedding. The final film therefore takes you on an emotional journey back through the experiences you had and the joy/anticipation/excitement you felt through the various rituals and celebrations.
To achieve this, the storytelling videographer prioritises their focus on people and personalities before recording the details and decorations. They are more interested in who you are as people, than they are interested in what you wore or in what temple your wedding was held. This is key for the storytelling videographer, because unique and meaningful story is always found in the subjective. It’s found in emotion and desire. It’s found in the unexpected reactions and spontaneous experiences of people as they journey through the various wedding celebrations.
The Storytelling Videographer also tends to be more hands off in their approach. For them, the most meaningful moments are those that happen naturally, without any interference or direction from the videographer. So they often will place less importance on creating directed photoshoot moments, and instead choose to capture moments that happened naturally… like the passionate but funny negotiations that happen to get the grooms shoe back.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.“ — Maya Angelou
Affect over Effect:
The Storytelling Videographer prioritise Affect over Effect. This is the heart behind a powerful story and a memorable wedding film. It needs to be grounded in the subjective. It needs to make you feel something because this is what we remember the most.
Both the Event and Storytelling Videographer seek the same outcome: To capture the most important parts of your wedding.
- The Event Videographer prioritises comprehensively capturing the objective events that took place at your wedding. Who attended and what happened.
- The Storytelling Videographer sees your wedding day through the eyes of the subjective. The people who you journeyed with throughout our wedding celebrations.
Both videographers seek a comprehensive capture of your wedding. One focuses on the objective, the other the subjective. What is important to you ultimately depends on what you value most.
Common Reaction: “That film moved me. You are both so perfect for each other”
What is our approach?
By heart, we are Storytelling Videographers who can’t help but get sucked into how beautiful humanity is and the richness of human connections that are on display during a wedding. We firmly believe that capturing raw and real moments is the most valuable use of the brush we hold to paint our picture with.
We do however appreciate the merits of the event and cinematic styles and feel they do offer something valuable. Given this, we always strive to make the moments captured as beautiful and cinematic as we can. We also understand the importance of capturing those specific events and moments that are important to each couple as well.
Our bias is just that we prioritise Affect over Effect and capturing who you are and how it felt, over recording everything that happened.
How long are our wedding videos?
As standard offerings, we deliver a 3-5min Storytelling Film of the wedding day. For multi-day weddings we highly recommend extending this film to at least 8-10mins with options to extend it out to 16-18 minutes in length.
In addition to the crafted storytelling film we also offer a seperate Indian ceremony edit that takes your 2-3hr long wedding ceremony and bottles that up into an eventful 30-40min video. You can also get the full set of speeches recorded and delivered to you as well. This gives you several seperate films that cater to different people and their needs. This, in some sense means you can have your cake and eat it too. The formal wedding ceremony is still well captured and each and every speech is recorded, but you also get a meaningful and bespoke storytelling film which is the wedding video you’ll want to pass down to generations to come.
The Take Home
Hiring an Event Videographer will comprehensively give you every (objective) thing that happened at your wedding.
A Cinematic Videographer will make you and your wedding look like a million dollars. Their priority is to create a visual masterpiece to watch in the years to come.
A Storytelling Videographer will make you feel something. It will take you back to relive how the moment felt and what it was like to be a part of your wedding day.