Today we’d like to introduce you to Abanob (Bebo) Aguib.
Hi Abanob (Bebo), thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up in Egypt and moved to the US when I was 12. As a kid I was always performing, playing piano, acting, just always trying to express something. That eventually led me to pick up a camera and start making my own short films. I would film them and premiere them at my church. And somewhere in that process I realized I did not actually want to be in front of the camera. I wanted to tell the story from behind it.
In 2017, a friend asked me to film his wedding. I said yes even though I was hesitant, because this was just a hobby, I was not trying to turn it into anything. But when I watched him and his wife see that film for the first time, I just knew. That was it. I started filming more weddings after that, mostly through the Egyptian and Coptic Orthodox community here in Nashville, and word just spread on its own. Some films went mega viral and it was scaling through word of mouth.
Around that same time I also opened a marketing and advertising agency because I loved business and I was good at it. Between the two I put myself through college, graduated from MTSU with a Computer Science degree, then took a product manager role at Asurion. So for a while I was doing all three at once.
Then in September 2023 I got married to my wife and the love of my life, Haidy. We came back from our honeymoon and she got laid off. That was a rough stretch. I kept grinding. Then on April 12th 2024, my birthday, I got a notification that I was laid off too, along with about 20 percent of the company.
It was 9am. Haidy was still asleep and I did not want to wake her up. I just went downstairs and sat there. Literally less than 30 minutes later she came downstairs glowing, after eight months of job searching, she told me she got a job offer. I believe that this was more than just a crazy timing coincidence.
I saw it as God telling me something very clear. She has the corporate chapter. You go do what you were made to do.
I shut down the agency, rebranded my wedding business to I Do Films, and went full time as a wedding filmmaker. Never looked for another job since.
I am more fulfilled now than I have ever been. Watching a couple see their film for the first time, or opening a box we send them and just losing it, that never gets old. There are films where a family member has since passed, and the couple can still see them, still hear their voice. That is what makes me show up every single time.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Definitely not a smooth road. Lots of deep ups and downs throughout the whole thing.
The early days were honestly easy just because the pressure was different. I was in college, still living with family, just doing what I loved. Nobody depending on me. It felt light.
2023 was the hardest year of my life. And I mean that.
I was a full-time product manager at Asurion. I was running the ad agency where I was scripting, filming, and editing everything myself and had a full load of projects. I had about 12 weddings that year, all back to back because in the Coptic community weddings are packed into specific seasons. I had just purchased a house and was renovating it. I was planning my wedding with Haidy. And I was traveling internationally for work with Tamer Hosny.
For people who don’t know who Tamer Hosny is, think Drake of the Middle East. One of the biggest artists in the Arab world, massive films, albums, concerts everywhere. He has been my dream since I was 14 years old. I started seriously trying to work with his team in 2017. Went to Egypt twice, met with the team, got rejected both times. Kept trying. It took until 2022 before they finally said yes.
And honestly? I’m grateful it didn’t happen sooner. If they had agreed in 2017 when I was still in high school, I would not have been able to do anything with it. I didn’t have the gear. I couldn’t travel internationally. I had nothing. By 2022 I had just graduated, had a full-time job, had a MacBook I could edit on remotely, had cinema cameras, and could actually fly wherever I needed to go. The timing was perfect, even though it didn’t feel that way during the years of rejection.
So in 2023 I was in Egypt four times, Dubai twice, Kuwait once, Jordan once, all for concerts and a film he was shooting. Doing all of that while also planning a wedding, renovating a house, running an agency, filming 12 weddings, and showing up to a full-time job every day.
I was not good at any of it by the end. And that’s exactly why I stopped. The people I was working for deserved better than a version of me that was running on empty. So I stepped back. It wasn’t giving up, it was more like I needed to get my life together before I could show up properly for anyone.
Then we came back from the honeymoon and Haidy lost her job. Money got tight fast because I had already stopped bringing in work from both the agency and the weddings. And then, on my birthday in April 2024, I got laid off too. Both of us with no income. Like I shared earlier, God stepped in fast, and that moment pushed me to focus fully on weddings.
In 2024 I decided to kill everything except one thing. Wedding filmmaking only. And that focus changed everything.
There was also the challenge of breaking into markets outside my own community. My early client base was almost entirely Egyptian and Coptic, and the reality of this industry is that if the couple on screen doesn’t look like you, a lot of people just keep scrolling. I knew I had to earn trust with people who didn’t already know me.
So I started giving away free save the date films. About 60 of them total. My thinking was simple. A wedding is one of the most important days of someone’s life. Every single person who matters to them is in one room, for the sole purpose of celebrating two people becoming one. From my faith, that is a deeply holy moment. You are trusting a vendor with something irreplaceable. That trust has to be earned, not assumed. The free save the dates were basically a free trial. Try us out. See if we vibe. See if the work is what you’re looking for. And if it was, we would talk about the wedding. Most of them hired us.
Through all of it I had two anchors. Haidy, who was there from the very beginning, helping me film the short films I was making to hand to Tamer and his team, basically helping me chase the dream before anyone believed it would actually work, believing in me when things were tight and it still looked crazy to most people. And my parents, who told me when I was 16 that I could do anything I put my mind to and never stopped saying it.
And above all of that, God. Every single pivot point in this story had his fingerprints on it. The rejection from Tamer’s team in 2017 that I didn’t understand at the time but was actually protecting me until I was ready. The 30 minutes on my birthday. All of it. I’m just following the plan he laid out. I wouldn’t change anything.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I Do Films is a wedding film studio out of Nashville, Tennessee. We film weddings all over the US.
The way I think about what we do, honestly, is I’m not making a film for today. I’m making it for 20, 30 years from now. When I’m on a wedding day I’m literally putting myself in the headspace of a family sitting together decades later, grandkids around their grandparents, watching this together. And I keep asking myself, what are they actually going to comment on? Not the cake. Not how the flowers were arranged, even though all of that matters for the aesthetic of the day. What they’re going to stop the film on is how their grandparents sounded back then. They’re going to see someone who passed away walk across the screen and hear their voice. Those proud faces, those handshakes, people sitting in the corner crying quietly. That speech from a great-grandparent who is gone now. That’s what I’m building toward. I want the films to be felt, not just filmed.
That’s also why I’m not a huge fan of the super jumpy highlight edits. I do those for the 60-second teaser that goes on Instagram right after the wedding, and we make those too, but the highlight film I try to keep story-first. Let it breathe. Tell the story as it unfolds.
And that’s why we also offer the full ceremony edit and the full reception edit, even though realistically nobody is sitting down to watch two or three hours of their reception the week after their wedding. But a decade or two later? You open that film and you watch your entire ceremony from beginning to end, multiple camera angles, every entrance, the reactions of people as you walked in, the stumble someone had, all of it. Those films get more valuable with time, not less.
We also do a Guest Messages Film where we roam around during cocktail hour and the reception and just hand people mics and ask them to speak from the heart directly to the couple. Parents, siblings, close friends, then everyone else. And we also pull each partner aside separately at some point during the day, just briefly, and ask them to say something to the other person they’ll listen to later on. Those are, I think, some of the most priceless things we do. Right after the wedding and also decades from now.
On the experience side, we really value these wedding days. We are there for the entire day in all our collections. We don’t charge per hour. We’re not there for six hours, we’re not there for eight hours, we’re there from the beginning of the slow mornings of getting ready all the way to the private last dance and the celebratory exit with sparklers or whatever it is. Because I want the couple to be as stress-free on their wedding day as possible. I don’t want them stressing about whether they’re gonna miss a part of the day, or trying to figure out in their head if the videographer stayed extra and how much that’s gonna cost them at the end. What you see is what you pay. No surprise invoices, no hidden fees, no extra payments ever when you’re dealing with us. We don’t want you guessing about anything because that creates stress, and the last thing I want on your wedding day is for you to be stressed because of me.
We also never delete any raw footage. The weddings we filmed eight years ago, I still have all of that footage today. And that’s not just something I say, we have actually used it in so many ways over the years. A lot of people lose their wedding films and reach out to us and we’re able to retrieve everything. Some couples come back after five years just wanting the raw footage. Some want an anniversary re-edit. And the biggest reason of all, if a family member passes away, we’re able to put together a quick edit to memorialize them, their voice, the way they moved, the way they reacted on that day. Being able to tell a couple “hey, don’t worry, I never deleted your footage” even if they come to me eight years after their wedding, that brings me a lot of joy honestly.
We also don’t send videos on Dropbox or Google Drive. Every wedding we film has its own Netflix-style landing page, very easy to share with family and friends, and it has a mobile app and a TV app so they can pull it up on their couch anytime. We also send a very luxurious box with gifts and a video album, which is a physical album that the second you open it, the video plays on the screen built right into the cover. They can just have it sitting out, guests come over, you open it, your wedding plays. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t live in an old email link somewhere that stops working in three years.
And our number one source of growth has always been word of mouth, honestly. Once we film a wedding we know the couple is going to tell every engaged person in their life about us. We don’t take that lightly at all. We also run free save-the-date film offers from time to time, just so couples can actually try us out before committing to anything. Because I genuinely believe in what we do and in the service we provide, and I want everyone to know about it. I wouldn’t be genuine if I kept it to myself.
What matters most to you?
Faith, family, and the people I serve. That’s what matters most to me.
My definition of success actually comes from John Maxwell. He said that success is knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others. I stumbled across that years ago and it just stuck. It’s the clearest way I’ve ever heard it put.
Knowing your purpose matters because without it there’s no focus, no direction, nothing to actually work toward. Growing to reach your maximum potential is something you never actually finish. It’s not a destination. It’s just what you work on your whole life and I genuinely believe that. And sowing seeds that benefit others is what makes all of it worth it.
For me, faith is the foundation of all three. God gave me a talent and I take that seriously. Not in a pressured way, more like a responsibility I want to honor. When I look back at my timeline, the rejections that turned out to be protection, the timing of everything that pointed me toward what I’m doing now, I can’t explain it any other way. I’m just trying to be a good steward of what I’ve been given.
Family is everything. Haidy has believed in me through every version of this journey, the broke version, the burnt out version, the version that was chasing a dream that didn’t make sense yet. My parents told me when I was 16 that I could do anything I put my mind to. That stayed with me.
And the people I serve, that goes beyond couples. One thing I feel really strongly about is being there for young filmmakers, especially passionate ones who are just starting out. When I was 17 or 18 and obsessed with filmmaking, there was nobody around me who had taken that path before. It was a lonely road. So every time I see someone picking up a camera now I go introduce myself and tell them if there’s anything I can ever do to help, just reach out. I’ve started mentoring younger filmmakers and hiring editors and crew from that same pool. It matters to me.
The best advice I ever got, honestly, came from my priest when I was around 19. I was doing agency work alongside very successful people with a lot of money and I kept comparing my 19-year-old self to them. It put me in a really bad headspace. My priest told me the only person you should ever compare yourself to is who you were yesterday. If you’re better than that person, you’re on the right path. That advice never left me. It’s how I stay patient with my own progress and how I try to stay genuinely happy for other people doing well, because comparing yourself to someone else is like comparing apples to oranges. You’re on completely different paths.
And the last thing, I always want to be genuine. Everything I do has to be right human-wise first. If it’s not, I don’t care how right it is business-wise. When you lead with that, everything else falls into place.
Pricing:
- Our collections start at $3,000 and go up to $6,000 depending on the level of coverage and deliverables. Every single collection includes full day coverage with no hourly limits, a highlight film, a social media teaser, a private film website, and raw footage archived forever.
- And as a thank you to Voyager readers specifically, I’m offering a free no-obligation Save the Date film to any couple who finds us through this article, subject to availability. Just send a DM on Instagram to @idofilms.co with the word “Voyager” and I’ll get you taken care of.
Contact Info:
- Website: idofilms.co
- Instagram: @idofilms.co
- Other: Email: info@idofilms.co
