Speeches, dark rooms and church sound: the parts that are hard

If you asked us what the hardest part of filming an Irish wedding is, we wouldn't say the weather or the light or the running late. We'd say sound. Specifically, the sound of a father of the bride speaking into a microphone the hotel last checked in 2019, in a room lit by three candles and a disco ball, in front of a hundred and fifty people who have had wine. That is the most important footage of the day and the most likely to go wrong, and almost nobody talks about it.

So we will. This is how speeches, dark rooms and church acoustics are actually handled, and what you can do to help.

Nobody has ever watched a wedding film and said the picture was too dark. Plenty have said they couldn't hear the speeches.

The dark room

Irish reception rooms are dim by design, and they should be. Candlelight, low lamps, a warm glow on the tables: that is the atmosphere you paid for, and the last thing we want to do is switch it off. Older video cameras needed light, which is why wedding videos from twenty years ago have a floodlit look, with the speaker squinting into a lamp. Ours don't. Modern cinema cameras with fast lenses see a candlelit room roughly as your eyes do, and often a little better. So the room in the film looks like the room in the memory.

Where we do add light, it is small, warm and out of the way: a soft panel bounced off a wall near the top table, dimmed until it is barely there, so that faces have shape rather than being silhouettes against the window. You won't see it. The speaker won't feel it. That is the point.

The speeches

The picture is the easy part. What makes a speech usable in a film is being able to hear every word, and that depends on where the sound comes from. A camera microphone fifteen metres from the speaker picks up the room: the clatter, the laughter, the person at table nine explaining the offside rule. It picks up the speaker as a faint voice in the middle of all that. Perfectly fine for atmosphere. Useless for the words.

So we never rely on it. We record three separate copies of every speech, and the film uses whichever is cleanest.

The first is a feed from the venue's PA system, taken straight from the desk the microphone plugs into. This is the cleanest sound in the room, and it is why we ask the venue in advance whether we can have one. The second is a small recorder we place on the top table, out of sight, as a backup for the moment the PA cuts out, which it does more often than venues like to admit. The third, for the vows and sometimes the speeches, is a lapel microphone the size of a fingernail, clipped inside a jacket. Three sources, three different ways to fail, and the odds of all three failing in the same minute are the kind of odds we're happy to live with.

The church

Churches are the hardest rooms of all. Stone walls and high ceilings throw sound around for a second or more after every word, so the priest's microphone, if it works at all, delivers a voice with an echo on it. Then the couple turn to each other and speak their vows quietly, facing away from the only microphone in the building, and the most important sentences of the day are lost to the back of a nave. That is the recurring problem of Irish church weddings, and the fix is the reception's plan, adapted: a recorder near the lectern for the readings, a feed from the church's desk where one exists, and a lapel on the groom for the vows, because he is standing eighteen inches from the bride and it catches both of them. Every church is a little different, but that plan works in nearly all of them.

What you can do to help

• Ask the venue for a feed from the desk. One sentence when you're confirming details: "Our videographer will need an audio feed from the PA for the speeches." Most venues say yes without a thought. The ones that hesitate are telling you something about their PA.
• Brief the speakers: use the microphone and keep it close. The single most common cause of an unusable speech is a speaker who holds the mic at their waist, or gestures with it, or puts it down to read. Ten centimetres from the mouth, all the way through. Say it to them twice.
• Let us mic the groom. It takes thirty seconds before the ceremony and it's invisible. The vows are the sentences you'll want to hear back most, and this is how they get heard.
• Keep the room's lighting as it is. Don't ask the venue to bring the lights up for the speeches on our account. We don't need it, and the room looks better without it.

Our couples tell us the speeches are the part of the film they watch most: at Christmas, on anniversaries, and, eventually, when one of the speakers is no longer here to give another one. That is why we treat the sound as seriously as the picture. It is the part of the film that becomes most precious with time, and it is the part that is quietly hardest to get right.