Our Experiences “Zooming” a Wedding
By: Aaron Mcphall
Tags: Zoom, Weddings, Covid 19

Well, we are in the midst of the global pandemic and just had socially distanced wedding. This is a write up what and why we did it so that you might learn from our successes and mistakes.

This article gets quite lengthy, and requires some know-how, nerdiness, and a friend to take on the role of streaming coordinator. GOOD NEWS! Kyle, our groomsman who helped set all this up, is for hire! He can coach you through this process, and help run the wedding on your day. http://pushpullpixel.com/

Backstory

My fiancee (now wife!) and I started our wedding planning roughly a year in advance. We followed the traditional path of planning: venue, catering, DJ, save the dates ~9 months in advance. We were on track for a September 20th wedding, until a global pandemic hit in March.

Things started shutting down 6 months ahead of our wedding. Our immediate reaction was to panic, just like everyone else. What do we do? Cancel everything? Grab wedding insurance? Continue like nothing has happened? We decided that it was best to hold off on changing plans until 3 months in advance to assess the state of the world. This decision helped reduce the fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the wedding. This also allowed us to sound a bit more collected when the family asked “are you still having that wedding?” by responding that we were deciding on June 20th.

The weekend of June 20th, we collected everything that we saw as pros/cons and made the decision to cancel and stream the wedding. Major factors were:

Over 95% of attendees would be remote, and from all across the US (California, New Mexico, Illinois, Florida, New York, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Michigan)

Members of the immediate family were immuno-compromised

As the wedding hosts, we felt as though it was our social obligation to cancel the in-person wedding and do our best to make it available. Additionally, we are planning to do an in-person event 1 year in the future (public health conditions permitting). Tears were had, phone calls to family happened, but everyone understood and said it was the right call.

Re-Planning Everything

All of our vendors understood that we were postponing our wedding due to health and safety concerns, and didn’t mind moving everything 1 year out. Score! We lost $0 in deposits and paid no additional rescheduling fees. That said, most of the vendors are small/local businesses, so we are still betting on the fact that their business can stay afloat 1 year out. We make it a point to continue to support our wedding vendors during this pandemic. Additional purchases were made for this ceremony, in addition to next year:

An “engagement session” with the photographer, for reduced wedding ceremony (photographing 2 people for 3 hours is much less than 75+ people for 8)

A bouquet/boutonniere set from the florist

A 6" round cake based on our wedding cake

The harder part of the conversation is how to proceed with a virtual wedding. We figured we had to:

Communicate changes in plans

Figure out how to run a virtual wedding

Running a Virtual Wedding

Our view, wedding night

Key decision 1: Who gets to attend?

To start planning to run a virtual wedding, we had to separate out who can be in person, and who couldn’t be. We also did our best to make things fair on both sides of the family. One side of the family was immuno-compromised, so both sides weren’t invited to be in person.

We created a Google spreadsheet of mailing lists with emails and phone numbers, and used that for the communications to respective parties.

Key decision 2: What events to stream?

Early on, we figured that we would stream the wedding. The issue is that do you just stream the wedding or reception, rehearsal, bachelor or bachelorette parties, etc? We had the following considerations below:

Bachelor and Bachelorette Virtual Parties

We didn’t do this, but in retrospect it would have been a good idea. This could easily be accomplished over zoom/webex/hangouts/etc. Jackbox Party Packs work suprisingly well over video streaming and players elsewhere.

Rehearsal Dinner Stream

This event may not make sense at first, but ended up being our 2nd best event (the first being the wedding). There wasn’t a dinner or rehearsal at the rehearsal dinner stream. It was really there for family and close friends to see who the important folks are that shaped us. I think there may be a bonus here that these are the people that are more comfortable with you, and ended up making a lively and wonderful session.

To help spur discussion, we had a list of topics (agenda items) to cover during the rehearsal dinner stream:

Thank everyone for coming and understanding

Go around the room for introductions to get family and friends to know each other. Plan the order for this ahead of time. Ours should have been: groom’ parents, bride’s parents, wedding party, etc.

Toasting, if you’d like to do that sort of thing (prepare folks in advance)

Play a game (we had Maid of Honor do a “He Said or She Said” /Also known as “The Shoe Game”)

By this point, the crowd should be comfortable with each other and embarrassing stories about the bride and groom will be swapped.

(See the “Home Studio for Reception/Rehearsal” section for tips on how we changed our dining room into a home studio)

Reception Stream(s)

This is a great event to hold; decisions here depend on how you’d like have folks on a zoom. We figured that more conversation would happen in smaller groups, so we broke the reception into 3 events: groom’s family, bride’s family, and friends. We separated them out into 1 hour chunks, 7–8pm, 8–9pm, 9pm-onwards. In those reception events, we had the following goals:

Toast and thank everyone for joining us on the wedding day

Thank the family for letting the other half join

Get a screenshot of everyone in gallery view

Cut cake

Perhaps dance

We had learned a day ahead of time that Zoom Pro subscriptions will boot folks out when the host joins a second meeting. This wasn’t great, as weddings aren’t sometimes used for a family reunion. This may have been better to use the breakout rooms feature in Zoom.

Wedding Stream

This section honestly deserves the most, and will be the longest. Let’s start with who all helped us make this happen.

We had 4 people physically present for the wedding: bride, groom, photographer, and officiant. We had another “attendee,” Kyle, who was physically across the country but ran the wedding stream. Let’s call Kyle the stream coordinator. I’d also like to call out that we could have used another person physically present to be the hands/eyes/ears of the stream coordinator or done a double check of the mics while the camera was rolling but before the ceremony officially started.

What did the stream coordinator do? For us, he ensured that the video stream was up and running; transitioned from pre-wedding slideshow to actual in-person event (this even included live webcams of cities from bride/groom’s hometowns/college towns); recorded the video session; he spurred discussion within the chat; and prepared folks to unmute when the bride/groom kissed. This role is 100% necessary, and we cannot speak highly enough of Kyle who took on this task.

We were lucky enough to have picked a wedding venue with great cellular coverage. It was an outdoor park, with a gazebo. If you are still selecting a wedding venue and intend on streaming, you should be assessing three things in addition to all the other millions of things you are also considering: internet connection, lighting, and audio.

For your internet connection, you are looking for some sort of strong connection to cellular or Wi-Fi. In addition to a strong signal, you will likely want to test the connection, as more bars doesn’t always mean more speed. I’d test it by hitting a speed check, and even firing up a video chat with friend while onsite. If it’s a shared Wi-Fi (aka some local business), you shouldn’t risk running off of it.

For lighting, consider where you, the camera, and lights (sun or overhead lights) will be. If possible, put the camera between you and the lights. Look for drastic shadows being cast where the camera may be pointed. If you are outside, you will want to look at sunrise and sunset times to know where the sun will be. You will also want to consider if the sun will hit equipment (we had a cellphone disconnect from Zoom in testing, due to thermal issues). If you need help, ask a photographer (or Kyle) for some more tips.

For audio, just sit and listen at ambient noise. Microphones are notoriously good at picking up the exact opposite of what you want. Consider time of day (road noise during commute times?), seasonality (are birds migrating or resting for the day?), bystanders (near a playground with kids), weather, and likely more.

The last thing to keep in mind is that we are in a pandemic, no venue is perfect, and whatever you ultimately decide will work. Balance the best you can, and don’t stress.

Setting up a Wedding Stream

Let’s start with the gear, and get to the purpose of it. We opted to throw as much as we can at this. Breakdown was:

Zoom Pro account

4x cell phones (1 as camera, two as microphones, 1 for coordination)

2x tripods (one with a cell phone mount)

2x lapel microphones

1x DSLR camera for a local recording (B-Roll)

1x Wi-Fi hotspot to cover phones that lacked a data plan

Why so much gear?

Redundancy was part of our strategy for dealing with risk. This was beneficial, as the microphone for the officiant did not get unmuted before the ceremony began. However, she was able to be picked up by the microphone that I had on me. Also, the second recording from the DSLR camera for the local recording did pick up on the officiant’s voice, so we are hoping via some video editing we will be able to splice the two audio sections together for one comprehensive recording.

So how was this all connected?

We used a DSLR camera to have a local capture of the event, in case there was an outage that impacted our ability to stream the wedding. Luckily, this backup mechanism wasn’t needed, but may be used for editing streams together. I used a Canon T3 (~$100 on ebay), with the magic lantern firmware installed. Magic lantern enabled an auto-resume feature of video. There are supposedly ways to go past predefined limits of recording, but this ended up restarting the stream at 4GB. This was placed on a tripod, at eye level. It was centered where the bride and groom were standing. The captured video isn’t great, because we had a giant shadow in the background. In retrospect, this could have been handled better.

We used a Zoom account to handle streaming. We purchased 1 month’s worth of Zoom Pro for $15 and shared the password with the streaming coordinator. This allowed the streaming coordinator to have a meeting longer than 40 minutes and allowed for 1 GB of cloud recording. We were expecting the cloud recording to get us ~2 hours of worth of streams. The streaming coordinator ended up doing a local recording, which I think improved the entire copy.

Getting into streaming equipment, we had a Pixel 4 setup as a streaming video camera. This cell phone had an unlimited data plan, and had the best camera. It was placed on a tripod, set above eye level, and pointed towards the bride and groom. I purchased a couple cases from Amazon, and settled on this one. The mount worked well with just the clamp, and not the arm. To avoid heat, it was placed in the shadow of a support column for the gazebo and had its case off. This camera had its audio disconnected in the zoom client.

The officiant had a Motorola g6, without a data plan, paired to a cellular hotspot. This was an old cell phone from a few years ago, which was still kicking. Upfront, we asked the officiant if she would feel comfortable wearing a microphone connected to a cell phone that we provided (she would need a pocket) and she agreed to do so. We purchased 2 cheap wired lapel mics and with foam muffs. Their pickup was excellent. Too good, as we could hear geese and road noise. The lapel mic stopped any audio out from the cell phone. This helped avoid feedback.

For the hotspot, we used an old Verizon MiFI 6620L hotspot picked from ebay for $22. The groom used to use the hotspot play Ingress. It’s been dormant and unused since Ingress Prime. It had a Google Fi data-only sim. Getting a data only sim: https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6330195?hl=en

For mic’ing the wedding couple, we used a Pixel 3a. This cell phone was the groom’s personal cell phone. It was on a Google Fi dataplan, so it was only used for audio and some coordination. It had the same lapel mic as the officiant. The microphone was placed in the boutonniere, which may have helped with any breeze. The lapel mic stopped any audio out from the cell phone. This helped avoid feedback.

The last cell phone we were counting was the bride’s cellphone, which was used to communicate with the stream coordinator. This was kept in the bride’s pocket (yes, she wants to point out her dress had pockets!) and “do not disturb” mode was kicked on once we got the all clear to begin from the stream coordinator

Handling the Wedding Stream Day-Of

You know that one person who has two clients at the meeting and creates a feedback loop which makes all sorts of noise? We intentionally wanted to not allow anyone to connect their mics. Also, no audio from the stream was present on-site to avoid audio feedback loops.

Since our streaming coordinator was disconnected from the rest of us, we had to establish a protocol to kick off the wedding stream. We needed to synchronize a go/no-go kind of situation when all was ready to start.

Home Studio for Reception/Rehearsal

We repurposed our dining room into a home studio. We specifically planned our space with the following three things in mind:

What activities will you need to support?

What will the camera see?

What noises will be heard?

What activities will you need to support?

In our case, we specifically planned for:

Dancing: We pushed the dining room table against the wall so that we had room in view of the camera to support dancing.

Cake cutting: We got a small cake, and planned on cutting it on the wedding reception, so tools were nearby. Napkins were also nearby in case of accidents

Chat with people: We brought out a large monitor to help us see all attendees easily.

Champagne: Bubbly was had, and so the bubbly was nearby on ice.

What will the camera see?

The bride obscured the hallway with 8x4 foot doorway streamers found at your local Walmart, Target, party store, etc. We also made sure the bouquet was in view of the camera. To be a bit more thematic to a wedding, we put white pillow cases over the backs of chairs to emulate chair covers.

Lighting everything was super important, so we borrowed lamps from other rooms and put them behind the camera. It was a bit painful the nights before the wedding to wander around the house in the dark, but it improves what the camera can pickup on.

Get the best camera you can justify for yourself. We were lucky enough to find a Logitech C920 at Office Max the day of the rehearsal.

What noises will be heard?

Our cat normally wears a bell, which the microphone would pick up on from far away. We took off her collar while on these streams. Luckily, the bride’s mother made a wedding- themed cat collar with a tiny veil!

Another thing you should do is test this setup repeatedly. On every call, ask for feedback. How do things look? How do we sound? (Our Maid of Honor was a champ whenever we messaged her and said “have time for a Zoom chat to test?”)

We ended up using a Shure MV5 microphone to handle the at-home events. Both the webcam and laptop mic were not great.

Post Wedding

Now that it’s after the wedding, you should take care of a few things in addition to other wedding wrap-up:

Save all the things to cloud storage as soon as you can. Don’t let it get lost.

Share the gallery photos from zoom events as you see fit.

Blog about your experience; I’d like to hear if we helped.

What worked and what didn’t?

Overall, this stream was a success. We got married, and many folks joined us. We had a successful audio and video capture, and two local recordings. But let’s discuss what didn’t work well, and how you might improve upon it:

DSLR Video capture: Where I placed the DSLR camera was a little different than the camera phone, and it had a drastic line where sunlight and shadow met through the middle of it. The camera focused on the lit grass behind us, causing the couple to be underexposed/dark.

DSLR Audio capture: If you are into making movies, you might have a better audio pickup for a DSLR. If you aren’t sure what to use, then someone online might know. I certainly don’t.

Streaming protocol: The officiant’s mic got muted right before the ceremony started. She was a bit soft on the zoom stream. In retrospect, some remote access solution for the cell phone might be a perfect solution here. That or some streaming thing that allows the streaming coordinator to force unmute a microphone, instead of asking to unmute. Another streaming service might have a better option for this.

A physically present day-of event coordinator would also be able to coordinate with the streaming coordinator, and would be able to address these issues.

Establishing rules with partner while on stream calls, to determine when it is ok to mute or kick someone. We all have those friends and family members who enjoy themselves a little too much in a social gathering. Take the time to make a plan, just in case you need to handle kicking an individual off the Zoom meeting.

All said and done, we are super happy with what we’ve been able to accomplish. It was thrown together with spare technology that we had lying around, and came together at a reasonable cost. I also totally acknowledge that the groom is a nerd of sorts, and had the hobbies to support this.