Please read this before considering hiring Sam Pratomoporn for any event.
I would not normally write a review but we have exhausted all other options at this point. Currently, we cannot get a hold of Sam. He is no longer responding to any of our reasonable attempts of contact to mend the situation.
Sam Pratomoporn (Iawar Photography) offered to do our wedding video for $3000. Based on all of the previous videos that he sent me, we decided to hire him to do both photography and videography.
We had been asking him about our wedding video for 3 years now. He had not responded to questions about our video until this year, saying that he was “having trouble receiving my e-mails”. My email account is a U of A email that has never given me any trouble and we always messaged him from previous threads to ensure it is not going to the wrong e-mail. I trusted Sam and did not rush him as he told me numerous times that he is extremely busy. I was naive to have trusted Sam.
The first look at our wedding video left me in tears and I am still so upset about it. Many important scenes from our ceremony are missing, are blocked by the heads of our guests, have over sunlight exposed images which makes it impossible to see our faces, have cropped heads of the bridal party, or have audio that was not properly connected, etc. Both Sam and his hired videographer agreed that the video is of poor quality.
When we saw how terribly made the video was, we contacted Sam. At that point, he claimed that he has nothing to do with the video; he was just just doing a referral to a company that he neither remembered the name of, nor could he even remember the name of the videographer! He also claimed that the videographer disappeared on him and he had no idea how to contact him. Clearly this is not true, as I have text messages confirming this and witnesses – other clients who confirmed that he was expanding into videography. Also, from beginning to end, we only dealt with Sam regarding our video, from price, choosing music, what style I wanted for the video, closing out the transaction and receiving the video.
The day after confronting Sam about his attempt at transferring the accountability for our footage, he said that he found the videographer and left me to try and work something out with Jared. Jared confirmed that he was only hired by Sam, by the hour, to tape the wedding. He was using Sam’s equipment and following Sam’s instructions. Jared told me that Sam was the one assembling the video. Jared was very responsive and remorseful of the poor job done and offered to try and re-edit the video out of his own time as a favour for Sam. However, he did not have any of our footage. Sam ended up having to send all the raw footage to Jared. I do not understand how Sam can claim that it was just a referral when on top of everything else, he had all the video material.
Overall, I will definitely not be recommending Sam P to any family or friends due to his dishonest character, attempts to avoid us and shift the blame, and his complete inability to rectify our issues. I have all of the documents, text messages, and e-mails confirming that Sam is responsible for my wedding video and I am in the process of reporting Sam to BBB.
In addition, if he agrees that the video is very poorly made – which he did, I think it is only fair to at least receive a portion of my payment back. We feel that not only did he rob us of $3000 of our money but more importantly, he robbed us of our memories.