Wedding films · Minho, Portugal
Real stories, filmed by someone you barely notice.
I’m Martinho. I spend the whole day beside you and almost always out of your way. What you get at the end is the day as it happened — not a staged version of it.
Three things I commit to
Before I tell you about films, three things I promise every couple. They don’t change with the package.
I stay out of your photographer’s frames. I’ve worked alongside photographers for years and I know how to read their space: if your photographer is making a portrait, I’m not standing behind him with a light in my hand. I get there first, I work out where he’ll place himself, and I stay where I don’t ruin his shot. You’ll get two coverages of the same day without ever feeling there were two crews in the room.
I don’t stop the day in order to film it. I won’t ask you to walk into the church again, or to open the letter you’ve already read, or to go back to that tree because the light was better there. What happened, happened once. My job is to be in the right place before it happens — not to ask the day to repeat itself for my convenience.
The sound is the day’s own sound. I record audio properly: microphones go on long before anyone needs them and keep running when I’m nowhere near. The celebrant’s voice, the thing your father said halfway through the toast before it caught in his throat, the song your grandmother asked the band for. None of that can be recovered afterwards.
The shape of the day
A wedding isn’t one twelve-hour block — often it’s longer than that. It’s four moments at four different temperatures, and I film each one differently.
Getting ready
I arrive early, usually before anyone is expecting me. That first hour is the quietest you’ll have all day, and it’s where the small things are: the dress still hanging, someone ironing a sleeve, your mother fighting a button that won’t go in. I film it with a long lens from the other side of the room. Most couples only realise I was there when they watch the film.
Ceremony
There is no second chance here, and no polite way to interrupt. I put the cameras where they get in nobody’s way — not your eyeline, not the celebrant’s, not the photographer’s — and the sound runs from the first word to the last. This is where discretion stops being a style and becomes an obligation.
Portraits
Portrait time belongs to the photographer, not to me. I follow from a distance and film what happens between the poses — the walk to the spot, the laugh after a direction, the wind in the veil while he changes lenses. It’s almost always where the shots couples love most come from. I ask for very little, and what I do ask is simple — I’ll never ask you to fake a feeling.
The party
At night I carry very little. One camera, a small light only when there is genuinely no alternative, and the room’s sound recording. A party is filmed from the inside, not from the stage: the people dancing shouldn’t notice me, and the only way that happens is to leave half the studio at home.
What you get, and when
Seventy-two hours after the wedding, the teaser is with you. One minute, cut from the best of what happened. It’s a firm deadline: it lands while you’re still answering everyone’s messages and something still moves in you when you talk about the day. It’s the film you’ll want to share, and it arrives in time to share it.
You can add the highlights, around four minutes that tell the day with more room than the teaser allows — the whole shape of it, without being the full film yet. It’s a paid option, separate from the package, and plenty of couples do without it.
The final film takes between sixty and ninety days, and it runs from fifteen to thirty minutes depending on the scale of the wedding — a very large event or something simpler. I quote the longer number on purpose. In August and September I have weddings almost every weekend, and increasingly on weekdays too. An honest edit doesn’t fit between two Saturdays; out of season it arrives sooner. I’d rather say ninety and deliver at seventy than promise thirty and spend November apologising. If there’s a date that really matters to you — an anniversary, a trip, someone who wants to watch before they go — tell me when you book and I’ll tell you there and then whether I can do it.
The documentary film
The short film is a version of the day: chosen, cut, set to music. It’s worth what it’s worth, and it’s what most people want to watch.
The documentary film is something else. It is barely edited, and that’s the point: longer stretches of the ceremony and of the party at the estate, with the audio recorded on the day, uncut to fit a running time. The music that played in the church is the music you hear — not the music I chose. The celebrant speaks and you hear what he said, with the pauses and the acoustics of the nave. The party sounds the way it sounded, with the band or the DJ sorting the sound, with the glasses, with the moment everyone sings and nobody gets it right.
It’s a long film and it isn’t for the week after. It’s for ten years from now, when you no longer remember the sound of someone’s voice. It’s the only format that keeps that, and it’s why I keep insisting on it.
It’s a separate service and it’s paid for separately — it isn’t part of the package. I say so plainly because I don’t want you finding out in the quote. Most of my colleagues don’t even offer it; I do because I think it’s worth having, but the choice is entirely yours.
Working with your photographer
A lot of my weddings come to me through photographers, and that changed the way I work. I know what gets in a photographer’s way, because I’ve heard every one of them complain about the same things: the video guy who walks into the frame, the light that wrecks the exposure, the colleague who steals two minutes from the portraits.
If you’ve already chosen your photographer, tell me who it is. I speak to him before the day, we agree who stands where, and you never have to manage any of it.
Films
Here is the work I’m allowed to show.
There isn’t much of it, and that’s deliberate. Most of the films I make never reach this site: some because the couple asked me not to publish, others because the photographer who hired me has his own agreement with the client. I respect both without arguing. The discretion I promise you on your wedding day doesn’t expire on the day I happen to need new material for a portfolio.
If this looks like a site with very little to watch, that is exactly the conclusion to draw: your wedding won’t be here either.
What I can show, I show. I keep putting the approved work on my channel — if you want to see more than fits on this page, it’s there.
Get in touch
Tell me the date and the place. I’ll write back saying whether I’m free and what it costs, without putting you into a sequence of automated emails.
Or write straight to geral@arantesfilms.pt.