When a bride is walking down the aisle, the only sounds anyone should hear are muffled tears of joy. But as the moment came at a wedding in Italy this summer, what Harriet* heard was the buzz of a drone circling above. “It was absurd,” she recalls. “A string quartet was playing at this breathtakingly beautiful ceremony, and then we just heard this buzzing sound rising above the crowd. Everyone turned around to look.”
Then the couple kept going missing from their own reception, an absence that was only explained later, when the bride posted on Instagram. “It was all heavily produced clips of them doing various things they must’ve been shooting while we were at the reception,” says Harriet. “I felt like I was watching an advert for their wedding.”
It might sound like something out of a Black Mirror episode, but this is the very real world of wedding content creation: a booming industry fuelled by couples looking to capture every moment of their special day one tightly edited clip at a time. Ostensibly, it makes sense. When so many of us are sharing the highlights of our lives online, documenting and curating every moment, why wouldn’t we want to present our wedding to the world in the slickest form possible?
