Ingredients we hid in Jess & Claudio’s Sauce?

Storyboarding (visual pre-planning of a project) is one of the most important stages in producing a film. Ideas from storyboarding must be communicated properly throughout the production process, involving both the Director of Photography (DP) and Cinematographer. These two individuals must hold a tight knit relationship throughout the course filming. It is vital that their vision is executed successfully and handed off to the editor with enough information to tell the story in post production (editing). To simplify this, these 3 individuals must always have a well thought out plan of what is supposed to happen while the camera rolls. In the world of wedding & event films, we often find ourselves taking on the roll of the DP, Cinematographer and Editor, (thus the reason for labelling ourselves as “Filmmakers”). The advantage we hold as Filmmakers is that we have full creative freedom to take our own ideas and translate them to be exactly the way we envisioned them. On the flip side, when something is happening live, there’s really only one chance to capture it the way it actually happened, which presents its own set of challenges.

So what is it that allows us to show up on the day of a wedding and tie a story together, that properly portrays our couple in less than 15 hours of filming? One might suggest that there are many ingredients mixed in our “Secret Sauce” and we’d have to agree. While some of these “flavours” are more evident than others, we feel that each one is essential and adds its own unique touch to our work. Having an extremely detailed vision of “what” and more importantly “who” we are filming is definitely key to staying relevant to the storyline. Some may critique our work and feel we’ve influenced our films on ideas that had nothing to do with the wedding day. As we progress to be better filmmakers and constantly push our craft to new levels, we feel that our most unique films have less to do with the wedding day and more to do with our couple. I like to think of it as “creating films about our couple on their wedding day” rather than just “filming a wedding”.

Jessica and Claudio’s film presented many opportunities for us step outside of the box and really think about how we wanted to share their personalities through this piece. Above are a few of the stills that influenced our storyboarding, filming and editing decisions, however there were several other key ideas we worked into this story. See if you can pick out more elements that we focused on to influence Jessica & Claudio’s Highlights film. Drop us a line if you think you’ve got them all.