You Bring the Backup Audio, I’ll Bring the Shirt and Tie

Chris McGinty (According ToWhim.com)

Miguel and I went to a get together of wedding professionals tonight called Thursday Therapy. It’s not quite as catchy of a title as Thursby Meading, but it’ll do.

Our reason for attending this get together is because we are trying to make a move into professional video production, probably on a part time basis. The people who meet range from caterers (some specializing in specific foods) to photographers, planners, and videographers. We spoke with a videographer who gave us some helpful advice, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The therapy session, as I’m going to call it because I’m cute, was held in the bar of the Hotel Zaza in downtown Dallas. There were a few things about this. The first one is that we more or less had to valet park. There was just nowhere to park nearby except for the big parking lot across the street that belonged to the hotel.

When we got inside, we discovered that the group was literally a mix and mingle, as opposed to a formal meeting with topics and speeches. The multitude of discussions actually made it hard to tell what percentage of the discussions revolved around industry talk. For all we know, it was all discussion about what movies they’ve seen lately and whose kids are playing little league.

The other thing is that we were not just underdressed, but we were really underdressed. These people looked like they just came from “not casual day” at the office. To make matters worse, so did the normal clientele of the bar. The website gave three names of the women who started the meeting, so we asked a woman who we thought was pictured if she was one of those three. She was not, but she directed us to one of them. It was somewhere in all of this that Miguel realized that we did not bring business cards, so we played it off like we are really just getting started since 1993, which is basically the truth.

She passed us off to a guy named Marc Roberts who has been doing wedding videography for a long while. He gave us some amazing advice that I can’t believe I didn’t think of myself: just start video taping weddings as much as you can and make sure you have tons of backup for your audio. Amazing.

But seriously, he said something that Miguel and I found interesting. He said that there isn’t really all that much competition out there for wedding videography. Admittedly, we were also told by a wedding planner that some people shy away from having their wedding videotaped. It’s hard to say.

All in all, I think Miguel and I had a good time hanging out, even if the results were a little anticlimactic. I made him listen to Rush on the way out. I’m sure he was miserable.