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A romantic movie of your own
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”A piece of Shakespeare’s poem from his 1599 play, As You Like It, shows that life indeed comprises of stories, and the people in our lives are the performers
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“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”
A piece of Shakespeare’s poem from his 1599 play, As You Like It, shows that life indeed comprises of stories, and the people in our lives are the performers.
Love stories are always gripping. Whether tragic, as Mariane Pearl’s loss of her husband, Daniel Pearl, an American journalist murdered in Karachi, Pakistan, or a recently told fairytale story of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Kate.
The lure of love stories brought filmmakers to tell them in movies. British director Michael Winterbottom, for example, transformed Pearl’s story into a Cannes selection, A Mighty Heart, in 2007.
While his work has received critical acclaim, Mark Rosman’s William & Kate: The Movie has received scorn from all sides. British media panned the movie as excruciating and nothing more than a money-grabbing project that took advantage of the 2011 royal wedding.
Rosman probably needs to learn from Susanto Widjaja — Santo for short — an Indonesian cinematic pre-wedding video director who resides in Sydney, Australia.
With two more partners, DOP Ferry and life-partner Dewi, Santo established Paper Cranes, a production house that specializes in producing short films based on true-life love stories.
Instead of an undirected documentation, a cinematic pre-wedding video makes the love story more dramatic and vibrant on screen. Just as in a movie, the emotion is developed through clear-cut facial expressions, captivating scenes and atmospheric background music.
With guidance from the director, the bride and other players are spurred to act a bit to make the story even more beautiful.
It’s a cinematic pre-wedding movie that follows the same production process as shorts or feature-length films, albeit in a simplified way. The story idea is not man-made; it comes from the bride’s true love story.
It is then conceptualized and enhanced by the whole crew. The shooting normally takes two days with a DSLR camera and very simple lighting. Then it goes to the editing room before premiering at the wedding reception.
“It’s like the ‘world premiere’, as we like to call it. We like to challenge our couples to wait until their reception dinner to watch it for the first time with their guests, so they can be surprised, too,” Santo said.
The movie of you and your fiancée would be an attention-grabbing show at the reception, as it is quite a new concept and creatively produced with the same quality of music and video as a short film.
Santo and friends are among the few people in the world who had the idea in the first place. His first production was in 2008, an unpaid pre-wedding video for a friend.
Paper Cranes Production has received 100 percent positive feedback from the clients and viewers. Some comments, such as “This film clip still makes my eyes tear up,” “How I wish I could re-do my wedding again. I saw this post on FB,” and “The most amazing work I have ever seen... I am sending it to all of my friends,” can be found on the company’s blog, weddingvideosydney.net, along with the videos they have produced.
A still from one of the wedding videos by Paper Cranes. Courtesy of Paper Cranes
On their website, papercranes.com.au, clients Kris and Shelly said, “Choosing Paper Cranes to be our videographer was one of the best decisions we made for our wedding. We had so much fun and lots of laughter during the wedding shoot. Santo is very enjoyable to work with, not to mention professional and talented!
“So never once did we hesitate about how the video would turn out, because we knew that it would be amazing! It really captured the emotions and the moments. Every time we watched it, we felt like we were re-living our special day. It brings us smiles, happy tears and joy.”
Since they have become an official company, they have been named one of the top-10 wedding videographers in Australia, top 50 in the world and won various other awards in Australia and the US in the past two years. They charge AU$2,200 (US$2,355) per production, which is a lot to add to the cost of a wedding, but if you compare it to a professional film production, it would be five to ten times more.
If you want them to do your pre-wedding movie but you don’t reside in Australia, don’t worry; they will come to you. They have gone to Jakarta, Bandung, Bali, Surabaya and Singapore to serve clients.
Weddings are surely one of the most special moments in life. Remember that we are all players, and we deserve a memento from our own stages. If our love stories can be captured in a beautiful way, it might preserve the love, as we will always remember the beautiful moment and the reasons that made us say, “I do.”
