Keeping it personal at Carton House

Carton is the largest venue we film at regularly, and scale is the whole conversation. The estate outside Maynooth runs to over a thousand acres, the house is one of the grandest in the country, and the reception rooms are built to a size that makes a hundred guests look like a small gathering. All of that is exactly why couples book it. It is also the thing that needs a little management if you want the film to feel like yours rather than a tour of a fine building.

Grand venues have a habit of swallowing people. A wide shot of a beautiful room with your wedding in the middle of it says a lot about the room and very little about you. So at Carton we shoot tighter than we do almost anywhere else, and we treat the architecture as something to glimpse rather than something to survey.

At a venue this size, the job is to keep the people bigger than the building.

The approach and the grounds

The drive in sets the tone, and it is worth taking slowly. Beyond that, the estate gives you parkland, mature trees and the river, which means portraits can be done entirely away from the house if you want a different feel from the formal rooms. That contrast is useful. Twenty minutes in open parkland gives a film somewhere to breathe between the grandeur.

The grounds are also open enough that aerial coverage works well here, which is not true of every large estate.

Light in the big rooms

The main reception rooms have very tall windows, and on a bright day the difference between the window side and the interior side of a room is severe. This is a genuine technical consideration rather than a detail. If you have any influence over where the top table sits, or where you stand for speeches, choose the side of the room where light is falling across faces rather than behind them. It costs nothing and improves the footage more than any equipment we could bring.

Making a big day feel like yours

• Protect a quiet ten minutes. At a venue this size you will be spoken to constantly. Book a short window alone together into the timeline and treat it as fixed.
• Use the parkland, not only the house. The formal rooms will be well covered. The estate is what gives your film variety.
• Keep the ceremony intimate in feel. If your numbers allow, seating people closer together rather than spread across a large space makes an enormous difference to how the ceremony reads on camera.
• Tell us who matters. In a crowd this size we need to know who your people are. A short list of names and faces before the day is worth more than any shot list.

Carton gives you a setting almost nowhere else in Ireland can match. The films that work here are the ones that remember to point the camera at the couple rather than the ceiling.