Best decision!!
Hiring Twenty Valley was the best last minute decision that we made for our wedding.
We made the decision to knock down our guest list from over 200 people to only 27 due to Covid, which meant the majority of our friends & family wouldn’t get to celebrate with us. Over the holiday season, many people expressed how much they wished we’d do a livestream of the ceremony, so we started looking into it a month before our wedding (which was at the beginning of Feb). Most wedding streams we’d tuned into over the past 2 years had been through webcam or iPhone, which is fine and free! We even did a test run at the venue using Facebook live, an iPhone, & a tripod. But when we saw the size of our venue, the limitations & logistics of self live-streaming, and the number of people who planned to watch live, we knew that we wanted a professional to make the viewers at home feel like they were truly part of the experience & ensures that the livestream would stream without a hitch!
Enter Mike from Twenty Valley Media! Ever the professional, he walked us through the packages available for a one hour stream and explained the process. He’d live-streamed a wedding at our venue previously and was completely reassuring that he’d capture all the best angles (3 cameras were set up!) and provide great footage.
He didn’t disappoint! He set up our livestream link on YouTube a few days prior to the wedding so we could share the link with our loved ones ahead of time. The livestream started 15 mins before the ceremony, and he had YouTube-licensed music playing over footage of our guests chatting and seating themselves, so people coming to watch early from home were reassured that they were watching the right channel. (BTW Mike, lots of people said they loved the songs you chose!). He captured the entire ceremony, cutting between cameras to ensure the camera was focused where it needed to be. When the ceremony was over, he had organized with us ahead of time to approach the camera on our way out of the chapel to thank everyone online for watching, before the livestream ended. This was a nice touch and truly added to the feeling that those at home were included and valued for being part of the ceremony.
I’ll also add that the livestream chat / message board was such a lovely addition to the ceremony. When we watched the video back a few days later (Mike provides you with the footage and the link is replayable on YouTube) Mike had edited it so we could see the messages people were leaving us throughout the more mundane parts of the ceremony. So cute and fun!
In all honesty, I first thought it would be too expensive to hire a professional live-stream company. Is it REALLY worth it when it can be done on your own phone? But now that I’ve heard the appreciation and genuine happiness from our loved ones who watched from home, and seen the quality of the video afterwards, I can say that it was 100% worth it. The dozens of compliments and words of appreciation we got from people watching from home was enough to know that hiring Mike was the best choice. People were SO impressed with the quality of the production and we were asked multiple times from different people how we managed it. Goes to show how people are really used to seeing these events through shaky iPhones or grainy webcams, and that services like what Twenty Valley Media offer are still rare, niche and unique. Now that I’m on the other side of the pandemic wedding planning, I can say with certainty that hiring a professional livestream company was the right decision.
Live-streaming with this vender truly made a difference to our wedding experience in terms of providing a unique and memorable experience to those who couldn’t be there physically. Plus, we now have a cute wedding video with lovely & funny commentary that we wouldn’t have had otherwise! An unforeseen keepsake, like a wedding book! If you want your livestream event to have the “wow” factor, or simply want someone you can trust to execute the tech flawlessly & professionally, then go with Twenty Valley Media! You will not regret it!