Kevin and I had been shooting digital video for years; in high school we'd run the weekly video announcements, had shot numerous awful music videos and shorts, things of that nature. We were really into video creation but had no formal training or experience. So when one of our friends from high school asked us, in late 2006, to shoot her wedding in January of the following year... :
"Sure, we can do that," we replied confidently, just knowing breath-taking wedding videography would be a piece of cake (ah, ignorance is a wonderful thing).
"Cool. So how much do you charge?"
The world paused. How much do we ... charge? The thought of commanding our own prices had not yet occurred to us. What were our services worth? A hundred dollars? A thousand? We honestly had absolutely no idea, so we began investigating. Three days and eight hours of intense competitor-scrutiny later, we arrived at a decision: "We'll do it all for six-hundred dollars," we said, knowing we were giving her one hell of a deal; anyone else, we had concluded, would be charging at least twice that amount for the services we were offering.
"Oh, that does sound like a good deal," she replied, and our breath caught -- would we actually get six-hundred? To broke, unemployed college students, this was like winning the lottery. She went on, "but I have $200. What can I get for that?"
The sound of broken dreams fluttering to the floor, I can tell you from experience, is much like a soft blanket of snow falling throughout the night - not distinctly audible, but viscerally palpable. Our hearts, now located somewhere around our socks, were rushed to the ICU as we lamely accepted her terms. Two hundred dollars... how insulting! But it was, too, our first actual paying gig, and the primary reason for our formation of the business. If one person would pay us to film her wedding, why not others? Why not the world?
And that's how we got started. Kevin and I formed Focus Ring Cinematic Productions in the Spring of 2007. Along with a friend and sort-of partner, a girl named Karri, we forged boldly, if somewhat incompetently, into the world of wedding videography.
And we're still here today.
-Steady State