Natalie Hind is passionate about her job as a wedding filmmaker

Natalie Hind found her passion as a wedding filmmaker. THE JOB I’m a wedding filmmaker – owner of The Auburn Hour Films. I am the owner and operator of a small but very successful wedding film business. I both film and edit wedding films and small-scale commercial videos, as well as run the day-to-day back end of operations including emailing, marketing, accounting and all of that fun stuff. THE PATH I grew up loving movies and TV shows. Obsessed might be the word – taping every episode of my beloved shows and eventually buying all the DVD box sets. When it came time to choose a path for university, I was delighted to find that ECU (Edith Cowan University) had an amazing film and TV major. These days you could probably learn everything needed for a career in weddings on YouTube, however, after completing my three-year degree, I was finding that the structure of large film sets wasn’t setting my heart on fire, and I preferred filming smaller scale events and fashion shows where I could do it all myself and was able to have greater creative control over the process of filming and editing. One day, while I was filming a local fashion runway show, the photographer turned to me and said that some good friends of his were getting married. They only had a very small budget, but would I consider filming their wedding? After careful consideration, I accepted on the condition that I would be able to capture the day without all the traditional bulky camera gear that most videographers used (tripods, gimbals, sliders) and bring my own creative flare to the day. I filmed that wedding and loved every minute of it, and so, in 2015, The Auburn Hour Films was born. THE GOOD There are so many things to love about my job. I have so much freedom, and couldn’t even imagine being caught in the restrictions of a 9-5 day job. Every wedding follows a similar pattern of events so in some ways it’s predictable, but every couple is unique and has different priorities and personalities and it makes every wedding day like a whole new experience. I am my own boss, I can take a day off whenever I feel like it, work the hours that suit me (at one time in my life I would start working at 1pm and finish at 10pm), I’ve travelled all over Australia and parts of the world through this job, and every day I get to make work that is meaningful and important to me and to my clients. The older I get, and the more people I speak to, the more I realize it’s a very rare thing to find something you are passionate about in life, to get to make money doing it, and still love it 10 years later. THE BAD Due to the low barrier to entry to this industry (what other business could you start for less than $10k?) there were many crucial aspects of running a business from the back end that I didn’t know about for an absurdly unacceptable amount of time: things like (to name only a few) how to pay taxes as a business, setting appropriate deadlines with clients, and what kind of contracts and insurance I needed to successfully and legally run my business. This led to a $17,000 tax debt at the end of my first profitable year as a business owner. I was shocked, horrified – July was meant to be a tax return time of year; how could this happen? It took me over two years to pay this back to the government. In part, this is why you might see a news article every year or two about a young wedding videographer or photographer who hasn’t delivered to a number of couples, or if they did, it didn’t live up to the clients’ expectations. They bought a camera for $2000, started booking weddings, saw the money rolling in and just didn’t think about any of the rest of it. I’ve been there. Essentially, it’s just remembering that the filming and the editing is only half the job; the rest of it is the unseen and usually rather mundane day to day of emailing and setting up accounts and meetings and, yes, taxes. THE FUTURE I am lucky enough to have couples who contact me for their weddings abroad each year. Destination weddings are a whole other ball game, and taking on a handful of bookings in other countries each year is something that really excites me and encourages me to keep seeing weddings with fresh eyes and gives me a reason to get out there and see the world. Moving forward, I plan to expand the amount of weddings I take abroad, and at the same time also limit the overall number of weddings I book each year so that I can maintain a healthy work-life balance.