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A ballroom built for a big night — and a family who have been hosting them since 1986.
The Venue
Lakeside sits on the Melton Highway at Taylors Lakes and has been run by the Galea family since 1986. That matters more than it sounds. Nearly forty years in, they have hosted every kind of celebration Melbourne's north-west can produce — Greek, Macedonian, Italian, Maltese, Lebanese — and the building has been shaped around what those weddings actually need. Room to move, a floor that can take five hundred people dancing, and a kitchen that can feed them all at once.
The Lakeview Ballroom is the room most couples come for. It is dark, deliberately so, with a mirrored dance floor and a ceiling that gets dressed to the couple's brief — the weddings we have filmed here have run cascading fairy-light installations the full width of the room, names projected across the floor, sparklers, cold spark fountains, the lot. It is theatrical in a way most Melbourne ballrooms are not, and it films beautifully if you come prepared for it.
Beyond the ballroom there are the Victoria and Wellington Rooms for smaller numbers, and a garden by the lake for ceremonies and portraits. Between them the venue can run anything from an intimate sit-down to a very large night indeed.
Selected Films
Why C2 at Lakeside
The Lakeview Ballroom is a genuinely difficult room to film well, and that is precisely why we like it. There are no windows. The light is entirely designed — warm festoon overhead, uplighting on the walls, moving colour on the floor — and it changes through the night. A camera that cannot hold detail in that will give you noisy, orange footage of the most important hours of your day.
Then there is the mirrored floor, which is beautiful and doubles every light source in the room, and the effects: sparklers, cold spark fountains, haze. Wonderful on film if you have exposed for them and are standing in the right place. Very easy to blow out if you have not.
These are also big weddings. Five hundred guests, a long entrance, speeches in multiple languages, dancing that does not stop. That needs more than one operator, and it needs people who know when the room is about to turn.
Fast glass and a grade made for windowless ballrooms. Clean skin tones, no noise, no orange.
Sparklers, cold sparks and haze exposed properly — not blown out, not lost in the dark.
Large guest numbers and a long night. Multiple operators so the entrance and the dance floor are covered at once.
Greek, Macedonian, Italian, Maltese and Lebanese weddings — we know what happens next, and where to stand.
Planning Your Lakeside Wedding
Ask your videographer what they shoot in low light. This is the single most important question for a Lakeview Ballroom wedding. The room has no natural light at all, and a lot of the night runs on coloured moving light. Kit and experience matter here far more than they do at a garden venue where the sun does the work.
Decide on your ceiling early. The ballroom's ceiling is effectively a blank canvas and the couples who use it get the most striking rooms — a full-width cascading light installation completely changes how the space photographs. It also changes the exposure, so it is worth telling us what you are planning well before the day.
The garden is your daylight. Between a church ceremony and a ballroom reception, the garden by the lake is often the only natural light in the run sheet. Protect that window; it is where a lot of your portraits will come from.
North-west location works in your favour. Lakeside is on the Melton Highway, which puts it close to the Greek and Macedonian Orthodox churches many of our Lakeside couples marry in — St Nikola in Preston, the Dormition of Our Lady, St Mary's Star of the Sea. Short transfers mean more time for photographs and less time in cars.
C2 Films has filmed and photographed many weddings at Lakeside Banquet & Convention Centre. The films above are all from the ballroom — have a look at how the room actually holds up on camera before you book anyone.
Melbourne Wedding Venues
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