La V cinema

New York Film Academy graduate I shoot and develop Wedding Feature Films for over 10 years by now.

I used to shoot and develop over 25 wedding Features each year, plus I supervised another 2 teams. But I was not happy with the quality and decided to do less for the sake of the final product. I shut down the multiple team business and today only offer our “Gleb Galkin Exclusive packages”.

I do max 10-12 wedding Features a year plus a few smaller size movies. I stand behind every frame of each of my movies. I love this craft. It’s a rare opportunity to be exposed to something wonderful and exciting that happens between two people. Others have to go to the movies to experience this magic. But in my profession, this magic is like the air I breathe regularly. It's great! And it’s an amazing life opportunity which I am very thankful to be part of.
One of my couples told me: You sell tears! That’s what you do! I think they nailed it!

I’ve been developing my style for years. I like my ability to create movies that flow elegantly which makes them appeal and relate to feelings so easily. I try to capture my viewers from the very first frame and don’t let them go until the very end. I raise their feelings up and down and get them ready for a climax near the end of the movie which guarantees joyful tears. It’s a great feeling to see people moved so emotionally by their own story.

I don’t think people realize it, but the wedding day is a sequence of very unique moments within which, a lot of things happen. Any single moment a situation changes and every single moment there is a place, an angle, a lighting situation, a gesture, a pose, a smile, an emotion, anticipation and million other things which can be captured in a way that later on has a great potential to produce a strong emotional reaction in a viewer. I have to “feel the moment” and figure it out in split seconds as well as manage the work of two other people since most of my projects are 3 cameraman projects, that often manage 5 running cameras at a time.

I love moments when clients let me see the depth of their true feelings for each other. These rarely reside on the surface. You can say – my favorite shots are those ones which I have zero control over. It’s something profound that happens on the other side of the lens.

Some people are very shy and it’s not in their nature to expose anything, especially their deep and intimate feelings. But with years of experience, I taught myself to see it through the camera and collect those moments throughout the day very carefully. These exact moments combined with proper music and knowledge of how to put together a good story, are the pillars of my style and my wedding Feature Films.

I used to love staged shots, where I can control everything. But over the years I lost appreciation for them in the context of weddings. A nice staged shot takes time and demands to sacrifice a lot of other genuine moments that life offers amply on any wedding day. We still do a certain amount of staged shots. But for my movies I prefer a lot of those unique and genuine moments – so I concentrate on them much more. After 10 years I know those moments are timeless for my couples as well.

I keep saying this "Feature Film". It is a technical term for me, it is a format of the movie that I put together that for lack of a better word I simply call “A Feature Film”.
Years ago, I started having an internal dialog with myself; what is the movie I would be happy to create for my own wedding? I started looking around and every movie I saw had some significant flaws for my taste. Then there were years of intense learning and importing different visual storytelling techniques. I started watching a lot of accomplished filmmakers and traveled to all the relevant seminars from the best wedding videographers and cinematic storytellers around the world. From that, I extracted a lot of little things I would love to have in my own movies. At one point I started being very happy with the final results. I like my ability to create movies that flow nicely and effortlessly. It sounds simple, but it's actually a very hard and challenging thing to do. I am sure my Feature Films have a unique timeless feel and many generations after will be enjoying watching these real wedding stories.

There is another very interesting thing that I started back about 5 years ago - CinePhotography.

Briefly, what it is – you don't need to hire photographers for your wedding day anymore.

LaVcinema will shoot your wedding onto our 4K cameras and each 4k video frame is technically a legit picture which can be printed in perfect quality into your photo album or blown up to a 17”x22” print. And since we shoot in cinematic format of 24 frames per second, with 4K video we literally have 24 pictures each second from just one camera to choose from. Now, remember that there are 3-5 cameras recording pretty much all the time…
We introduced new procedures and made changes to our shooting style in order to make it possible to build albums and slideshows in post-production to the level I’d be happy with. CinePhotography is a great technique for Weddings, since true capturing-the-moment now became technically available through shooting 4K videos. I am in love with it.

I hope I got you curious and I look forward to hearing from you soon.