When I sent some questions to Oleg Kalyan for his feature on the RF blog, I inadvertently forgot to ask what his “style” was. A common question for videographers to ask colleagues.
In hindsight, maybe it was a silly question. Just when I pegged him as a documentary wedding filmmaker, he comes up with a razzle-dazzle edit worthy of a 3rd, 4th and 5th viewing. I was kinda glad I didn’t ask that question.
No matter the style, the output is fresh and brilliant.
Oleg studied film in the US and is formally trained as a DOP. He stumbled upon events, applied his skills to weddings and never looked back.
Oleg Kalyan is a reminder that the world of wedding filmmaking is not America-centric. If you do your research, you will find out that Russia/Moscow is a hotbed of talent in event filmmaking.
This is his take on the phenomenon:
There are different reasons for the growth. We are eager to learn from our colleagues from around the world, the IT technology allows to see the work of colleagues instantly on resources like youtube, vimeo and exposureroom, I really think that not only in Russia, but overall in the world we see a growth of creativity and the amount of talent in wedding video. I am amazed by the quality of work done by very talanted colleagues from Philippines, Canada, Australia, the US and my home country Russia.
Equal to my admiration for his talent is his philosophy for doing what he does. There will always be clashed in viewpoints but one cannot deny the validity of his rationale. A forum post he wrote that stuck to me was his dislike for “wedding clipmaking”:
A wedding documentary filmmaking describes what personally I strive for in my work.
The direction the industry developed so far was based on short form of representing our work, historically due to internet constraints. What most of us do is cut some beautiful moments captured by a video camera to a music score, more often to a song, thus presenting the essence of a wedding in somewhat highly formalistic style.
I felt myself being directly spoken to. And my eyes were being opened:
The music has the spirit, the life of it’s own, and helps to convey emotional experience, (regretfully we do not produce our music, that is another side to look at), but the nuances, the voices, the impressions of reality in a way that is more meaningful from a historical documentary stand point may be somewhat lost while going for a style, a form, a clinging to a particular popular song. And when our colleagues take the same song and next day you see several similar videos, cut to same song it’s no fun. The accomplishment and originality lost a bit as a result .
Such eloquence! – and English is his second language!
I love it all, don’t get me wrong!
But the form can not be more important than the essence, the images should deliver the meaning. In many years to come the essence of a document of how it really was, the essence of the personalities of the people becomes more important.
And we all want to tell a story of a wedding day, for the history. The degree of creating a truthful convincing emotional experience of any kind, keeping it with a documentary approach determines if can we call ourselves as wedding filmmakers, IMHO.
That is exactly what I would like to share on ReFrame, developing a personal film making approach, nuances of it, a blend of a documentary and a narration. Telling the story, developing a system of relationships from captured images, sound, into narrative that has a meaning!
Oleg Kalyan will have his first speaking engagement stateside in Re:Frame San Francisco.
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