Marie & Chris

I don’t think any of us will forget the day of the pre-shoot. After rescheduling due to rain, we found ourselves in a race with mother nature. As we approached our location we saw the dark clouds above. We immediately got on the phone with Marie and Chris to get their thoughts. Knowing that our second location would be covered by the streets above, we all decided to venture to the beach and attempt to capture what we needed before the storm came crashing down.

Fortunately for us the looming weather had people exiting the beach, which gave us even more room to shoot. Even more fortunate is that we were able to get the shots we wanted, and then some. The rain only started when we got to our cars! This is just an little example of how, sometimes, you stay on course and brave the storm!

As usual, we'll take a bit of time to give insight into our process. Marie and Chris didn’t have any direction too specific or restricting, so it was case of trying to get a grasp of what they might like and what they won’t like. We’ve always wanted to have an opening title that featured the couple on their own separate title cards. We thought it would be cool to add the film burns for titles, and decided to go against making it a motif (except for the ending, to tie things together). It just felt right to leave at the beginning, like the intro credits to a show.

The first half is a simple story of Marie and Chris on a journey to each other (this is also why we kept them separate for the opening). There’s a few shots of each of them wandering, we see items they will be wearing on the day. We kept prep shots a minimum here, and evenly distributed (wasn’t planned that way, but you have to go with the flow sometimes).

The build to the ceremony came out even cooler than we expected. While we had the whip-pan transition planned for a before & after, we didn’t exactly know where they were going to get placed. It ended up making so much sense to have it right before the ceremony, because it was the completion of them being ready for the moment. Then, as planned, we present a scene of them finally meeting, on a beach, and match cut (we tried) to their meeting at the alter.

After the ceremony, we used the awesome live drummers to help us transition between songs. The entrance was another match cut we had planned. During the pre-shoot we had Marie & Chris walk a few different times and sway their hands different ways - without telling them why :P

There isn’t much more to say that the visuals don’t say for themselves. We had to be obvious and use a mirrors shot during ‘Mirrors’, but how could we not? It was great having a slow paced song like that at the end, because it gave us the opportunity to hold on some shots for longer than usual.

// creative montage // same day edit //