“Everywhere we travel we tell people there’s no better place to get married than Oregon,” says Ryan Welch, co-founder of Moetic Wedding Films, a high-end wedding film production company with offices in Eugene and McMinnville, Ore. “The problem is,” Welch continues, to take advantage of Oregon’s natural beauty “you’ve only got three months. We’re not going to film a wedding here in the Northwest until June.”
Welch and his business partner Ryan Rossman aren’t interested in making just any wedding video. They want to make wedding films. And to do so, they have to reach markets like Sonoma, Santa Barbara and Phoenix — places where people not only get married year-round, but also can afford an expensive memento of the special day.
Welch says he and Rossman decided early on, “If we’re going to make this work, we’re going to have to price ourselves out of the [Lane County] market and travel. Our goal is to try and fill our Oregon summers here,” Welch continues. “The challenge is to figure out how to get down to California because they’re getting married in November.”
Rossman worked for a time in Brooklyn. Contacts in the New York area have led to Moetic shooting in places like St. Lucia, the Bahamas and Cabo San Lucas. The company also finds work online through Google search engine optimization and posting to wedding blogs like Style Me Pretty (stylemepretty.com).
“People who are hiring us don’t care where we’re from,” Welch says. “They don’t care about the cost. They’ve got good income coming in and they just want to throw a sweet party for all their friends. We give them a wedding film, five to seven minutes, and a 90-minute documentary film,” he continues. “What we hear a lot is that we’re able to capture their story in a way that makes it come to life.”
Welch says shooting weddings can be a grind — if you’ve seen one wedding you’ve seen them all — particularly in the age of social networking sites like Pinterest. But Welch thinks focusing on the couple and their story helps the process stay fresh for him.
“The couple’s unique,” Welch says. “When you realize there’s a couple that loves each other, then you have a story. And if we can figure out a way to tell that couple’s story then every wedding we do will be unique and different. When people see our films they come away feeling like they know that person. It’s the storytelling that most people find attractive about what we do.”
For more info, visit moeticweddingfilms.com.