Three couples seek answers, and their footage, after wedding videographer doesn't deliver

The newlyweds went to TVNZ’s Fair Go for help locating the hard-to-find businessman.

When the big day is over, some brides and grooms want to relive the magic of their wedding again. That includes three Kiwi couples, who organised a video recording of all the key moments. Or so they thought.

Donna and Jason King were the first of the three to hire Christchurch videographer Alexei D’ath of ‘AD Productions’ after she put the feelers out on a wedding Facebook page.

D’ath offered them a package that covered the ceremony, speeches, guest messages and a highlights reel for $1000. They paid him an additional $300 for the raw video of their wedding.

Donna King told Fair Go they weren’t after “a perfect, polished piece”, rather raw footage that captured the ‘history’ of the day.

Not long after their wedding in October 2019, the couple received a short, one-minute social media teaser from Alexei D’ath. But he didn’t deliver anything else.

D’ath had a contract with his clients that stated it would take up to eight weeks to edit the wedding footage. Donna continued to wait and gave him more time around Christmas because she didn’t “want to be one of these bridezillas”.

But Donna had every right to get her ‘bridezilla’ on. A whole year passed and the couple were still waiting and wondering.

“We paid for a gatecrasher, a wedding crasher to come to our wedding,” says Donna.

Another couple, Nikki and Alan have been waiting more than 40 weeks for their footage.

Nikki said it’s “really bizarre” how D’ath would spend the entire day and night filming their wedding, but have nothing to show for it.

“The first red flag was when we got back from a little trip away with our family and just hadn't anything heard from him. When I emailed him, he took forever to respond and then it took me chasing for him to finally say he had been under the weather and that he would get the video to us, like that week."

That never happened.

Kristen and Kayden Skilling have been waiting months too, even threatening D’ath with legal action.

“I said, 'Look, if you're not going to email me back or text me back, you've given me no other choice,' and basically after that message I had no contact from him,” Kristen told Fair Go.

The AD Productions website and Facebook page went down but Fair Go managed to get in touch with D’ath.

He told the programme that he did still have the footage from all three weddings but said that Covid-19 and personal health issues limited his ability to deliver it to the couples.

He also said that “some brides expect more than what the videographer or photographers give them”.

“When they contacted me and saying, ‘Oh actually, we want this, this and this now, I was suspicious at why they were asking that”.

Fair Go pointed out that wasn’t the case with the three couples that had been interviewed for the story and all had been left waiting far longer than the length of time specified in the contact with D’ath.

D’ath said that he did send Donna and Jason’s raw footage on a USB drive in the mail, but didn’t get a track and trace number assigned to the package.

“I don't actually put tracking numbers unless it's something quite major like a wedding album or something."

He said he’d had a tough year, but he wasn’t a bad person and that, “I'm not someone to scam people."

D’ath agreed to meet with Fair Go to hand over the raw footage for all three couples, which has now been passed onto them.

While the couples were thrilled to get the footage, some did say the standard isn't as high as they'd hoped it would be.

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