Tonight I attended a rehearsal for a wedding I am shooting tomorrow. I usually do a 2-camera shoot — handheld Canon XL1s and tripod-mounted Canon Optura. My main goals during rehearsal include (1) finding a good place to sit/stand where I can get most of the action and (2) finding a good place to set up the stationary camera.

The stationary camera usually goes at the front of the church, near or behind the altar, facing out toward the crowd. While the bride and groom practice their positions, I frame the picture so that I can get a good angle on one of their faces — usually the groom’s. Then I sit in the pew on the opposite side and shoot toward the altar so I can get the bride’s face. This works well if they are facing each other during most of the ceremony.

Sometimes a bride and groom will face the altar, which makes it difficult to get their faces during the ceremony. In one wedding, I got great shots by actually sitting up behind the altar and shooting out toward the audience. They didn’t mind my presence up there — actually, it’s the best overall view during a wedding, which is ironic since the crowd is facing the complete opposite way — but seeing a guy up front behind the couple, pointing a video camera in your direction, is distracting for some people. A wedding is a very personal thing and different folks have different tastes.

So my first and foremost goal in shooting a wedding is to be as invisible as possible. Which isn’t always easy, by the way. But in my experience, the still photographer — who has a MUCH more stressful job — is usually running the show already, so I can’t possibly be more intrusive than he/she.

By attending the rehearsal to work out details like this and get an overall idea for how the wedding is going to flow, the actual wedding day goes a lot smoother. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll visit the salon while Debra and her bridesmaids are getting their hair made. Always makes for good video. The wedding starts in the evening, with a cake reception afterwards. This will be one of the shorter weddings I’ve shot.

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Today I met with Donna and a lawyer friend, Jim, to discuss our business plan for the *Artists’ Essentials* series of instructional art DVDs we are going to produce. I drafted a 15 page business plan packed with details on our market and the competition, marketing and sales approaches, distribution plans, a summary of our project and a complete financial breakdown. It took me a long time to do that, but let me tell you it is a *huge* help to focus your plans and be forced to put everything down on paper. And it’s just the professional thing to do.

I get more and more excited every time we meet — this project has a really good vibe to it. Case in point: Jim is a published author and has lots of experience producing and marketing educational products. He came fully prepared to poke holes in our plan and play devil’s advocate. He was surprised, however, that we really knew what we were talking about and had thought it through so well. He turned from skeptic to cheerleader over the course of just a few hours.

Donna treated us to lunch at Applebee’s to finish off the discussion. We have finally settled on the aforementioned name for the series. Donna and I are forming an LLC, which gives us personal legal protection in case the whole thing goes bust and we owe a bunch of money. Plus, we can claim our losses on our own personal income tax. We agreed to split the expenses and the profits 50/50, which is just easier in the long run.

What concerned me most is not the actual production of the video — I know that’s going to go well and I have confidence in our combined abilities — but how we are going to *sell* these DVDs. Amazingly, Donna has incredible relationships with both national and international art supply distributors. Once again, we’re tapping our network and pooling resources to do amazing things.

First things first, though. We registered a domain name (“artistsessentials.com”:http://www.artistsessentials.com ), which will soon have promotional information about the upcoming series. Keep watching this space!

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Since this is my first post to the shiny new website, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Dakota Russell, the second half of Red Forty Entertainment. My work is mostly in the screenwriting arena.

The process usually goes something like this: Todd calls and says, “I need a script about x in y weeks with z amount of toilet humor.” Then I just do the algebra.

This formula has produced some of my best work.

In conclusion, I’m glad to be contributing here. You’ll hear more from me as projects start progressing.

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