Save a seat for absent family members who are Skyping into your wedding

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#Friends & Family Advice#guests#skype#steal-this-idea#webcam
S + S

At Susanne & Scott's elegant rock ‘n' roll taco truck wedding, they were sure to save a seat in the front row for some important guests who couldn't attend in person…

Scott's mom and stepdad couldn't make it out for the wedding, so we had them “sitting in the front row” using Skype. It was very moving for all of us.

We've featured numerous weddings where guests Skyped in, but we love the idea of literally saving them a seat.


photography: Jonas Seaman

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    Comments on Save a seat for absent family members who are Skyping into your wedding

    1. I Skyped in to my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary party recently. I am living in Europe, and they live in Iowa. So with the time difference, I woke up at 2AM to hang out while everyone ate dinner and played a slide show. The hotel AV team hooked me up to the big presentation screen, so my head was 5 feet tall! Photos from the event show me like the floating head from the Wizard of Oz. 🙂
      It was great, everyone came up one by one (while waiting for the buffet line) and said hi to me. I was able to feel like a part of the party, even half a world apart.

    2. We had a live webcast for all the family that couldn’t make it to the wedding as well as a video recording the ceremony that we were able to make DVDs out of to send to folks after the fact. It was a huge hit, I think we had about 112 in person guests and around 40 virtual guests at the ceremony.

      The one bit of advise I would give if you are going to do something any more complicated than Skype is to set up your wedding website for the day of the ceremony to have only the video broadcast element and make sure your site has an easy to find/remember name from the get go. Most of the folks who couldn’t make it were the older set of invitees (grandmas, great aunts, etc) that weren’t as tech savvy and some had trouble navigating to the site we used for the broadcast.

    3. We also had a chair with a laptop for virtual guests during our ceremony (and Jonas Seaman photographed that too!). We used Google+ Hangouts and almost all the guests who intended to use it were able to. The one hitch was that I hit “mute” so the virtual guests wouldn’t be heard during the ceremony, but they told me later that then they couldn’t hear US at all! Just video, no sound. Womp-womp. I love the idea of doing a DVD later, though…really wish we’d been able to record the Hangout.

    4. The added bonus to this being the increased sight lines provided by not having an extra body/head in the front row aisle seat. 🙂

    5. Oh, definitely save a seat! We streamed our wedding, but the laptop wound up in the back of the chapel (mostly due to music issues). Sadly, our guests viewing the streaming mostly saw our second photographer pick his wedgie!

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