We spent four days in the mountains of Colorado with Mallory and Clay, and by the end of it we felt less like their filmmakers and more like family.
Whitewater rafting in the ice cold San Miguel river. Cheesy hot dogs, which are a Clay family tradition and are not optional. Off-roading over mountain passes. Celebrating all over the town of Ouray. Four days is a long time to spend with a couple before you film their wedding, and it is the single best thing that can happen to a wedding film.
Mallory opens the film with something out of Buddhism: that whenever you meet someone, your heart pounds and your knees go weak and your hands shake, and that person is not your person. Whenever you meet the other half of your soul, you feel calm. No anxiety. A stillness takes you over.
And then she tells him he’s her tranquility. That she was scattered into a thousand pieces whenever they met, and that he showed her every piece doesn’t have to be perfectly in place to make something beautiful.
His letter goes somewhere else entirely. He talks about the promise made to young boys and young girls, that one day they’ll meet the love of their life and share a great love story, and that the love between them will be special and powerful and beyond the understanding of everyone around them. Then he says: we both know this is that. And he vows to make his life worthy of it.
The line the film is named for is hers. She says she’ll always use their love as her compass, and because of that she can never be lost. Then she goes further, and this is the part I keep coming back to: she didn’t unconsciously fall in love with him. She walked into it with her eyes wide open, choosing every step. Love is a choice, and she vows to keep choosing it, in a hundred lifetimes and worlds yet to come.
The Vows To Gavin And Holden
Clay didn’t only marry Mallory. He also stood up and made vows to her two sons, and I want you to watch that part specifically, because I have never heard it done better.
He calls them a gift. Three for the price of one. He says they’re his boys now too and he’ll love them as a father, and then he goes through them one at a time. Gavin, passionate and kind. Holden, strong and smart and loving. He vows to love them and stand by them through all of life’s great adventures, and he tells them they’re his family now, and part of the great love story.
There’s no filmmaking trick in that section. It’s one microphone, one angle that holds, and two little boys listening. That’s it. Whenever somebody says something that good, the only correct decision is to stay out of the way and let it run.
Watch their film and you’ll see two people who were a bit lost until they found each other, how her free-spirited streak fits his adventurous one, and what an immeasurable, never-ending love actually sounds like whenever people try to put it in their own words. By the end you might feel like family too.
Planning on eloping to Colorado, or anywhere else? We’d love to film it. Get in touch at filmstrong.com. The gear I carry to weddings is at kit.co/whoismatt.
This is part two of the behind the scenes of Noah and Mallorie’s wedding film, and it covers every aspect of the bride and groom getting ready: getting dressed, hair and makeup, the letters they wrote to each other, everything leading up to the ceremony.
💡 How to get gorgeous lighting out of whatever light source the venue already has
🎙 The exact audio setup I use for crispy letter reading audio
🌈 Prism trick shots for in-camera effects
😍 Techniques to make even a small or ugly room look amazing on camera
And every lens, focal length, aperture, and ISO is burned right into the screen in the video, so you can follow along exactly.
Two Rooms, One Cottage
Both of them got ready in the same building, which means job one is keeping them from seeing each other. Job two is that the two rooms were not remotely equal.
The bride had a massive space with a beautiful window. She also had this kind of gross 3200K tungsten light hanging over the makeup area, and if you shoot her under that you’ve thrown away the best thing about the room. So the plan whenever Mallorie is getting ready is simple: move her over by the window and use the pretty natural light instead.
The groom got a really tiny room. Slightly more cramped, slightly darker, still workable, still totally workable. Cute little bathroom, cute little closet, and no window, which is the actual problem. But there was a door with glass in it, and another window over by the couch.
This is exactly the argument for showing up early and doing as much pre-production as you can, because whenever you’re in the space ahead of time you can still change things to make them look as good as possible for the film.
Turn The Lights Off. Move The Furniture.
One thing we like to do is walk in and turn off every light in the room before anybody arrives. People come in, it’s dark, somebody says something, and you go “no, leave it.” Give it a few minutes and their eyes adjust and nobody complains again. Now the only light in the room is coming through a window, and it’s beautiful.
Then we move things. We are not afraid to completely rearrange a room if that’s what it takes to make it look pretty. Chairs go against the wall, the couch gets shoved back, and suddenly there’s room to work. Watch for what sneaks into frame while you’re at it, because an AC unit in the background of your hero shot is not, as the kids apparently say, fleek.
Give Them A Home Base
Before rolling on the groom getting dressed, I put him on a mark and told him this is home base. Stand here, face this way, this is where the light comes in from outside, and after every single thing you do, come back to this spot. Line yourself up with the edge of the couch so you remember it.
That one instruction is worth an enormous amount, because now I can shoot a wide, then move in for a close-up, then move again, and every shot still cuts together, because he keeps returning to the same place in the same light.
Frame Rate: 30 For Prep, 24 For Letters
For getting-ready coverage we shoot 4K at 30 frames per second and conform everything down to 23.976 in the edit. That gives you around 20 to 25 percent slow motion, which isn’t a ton, it just adds a slightly dreamy look, and that’s exactly what we want for this part of the day.
The letters are the exception. Whenever we film someone reading a letter out loud, we switch the cameras to 24 frames per second, because we don’t want any slow motion at all, we want their lips to match the audio.
The Audio Setup For Letter Reading
A Sennheiser G3 lav running into a Zoom H5. I know wireless makes some people gasp, but the whole point is that I’m standing right there with headphones on the recorder, so if there’s static or interference I hear it immediately and we do the take again.
I generally mic the groom and Rachel mics the bride, which just makes the whole thing less awkward. Sometimes the bride is still in a bathrobe and you do not want to be the guy asking to run a cable up her shirt.
The mic itself is fully visible on his shirt, and it does not matter at all, because of how we’re framing. I shoot down low, roughly in the eyeline of whoever is reading, head and shoulders. Rachel comes in tight on the face. Between the two angles the lav never makes it into a single frame.
The Mission Impossible Mic Check
Have them say “test, test, 1, 2, 3,” and then have them say the word toast. Toast is great because it gives you that hard S sound, so you get your levels and you get to hear how the sibilance is behaving, which tells you a lot in one word.
Where’d I learn that? Mission Impossible. Tom Cruise did it whenever he was checking audio levels and I stole it. I’m not crazy, it’s true.
The bride’s room had a blown-out window right behind where I needed her to be. So out come the prisms. Holding one in front of the lens lets me physically block part of that blown-out background, which keeps her properly exposed while turning the hot spot into something that looks intentional and cool instead of broken.
On lenses: that room got cramped fast, so I was on the Sigma 50mm and Rachel was on the Sony 135mm, and the 135 is about as long as we’d ever want to go in a space that tight. You’re just trying to get exactly what you need without backing into a wall.
What We Don’t Film During Hair And Makeup
We don’t start at the very beginning, because going from no makeup to finished makeup is a pretty extreme transition on camera. We generally get in around halfway through.
We also don’t film hair extensions or fake eyelashes going in. Both of those just look weird on camera, all glue and weaving, and it does nothing for the film. And keep in mind the makeup artist is under real pressure in that moment, so give her room.
The photographers arrived partway through and we shared the space, which worked really well because we know them, we’ve worked with them, and we’d talked to them before the wedding. They also knew ahead of time that Paul was coming to shoot this behind the scenes, so nobody was surprised and nothing got weird. That conversation is worth having every single time.
Confession Time
Even though I’ve shot hundreds of weddings at this point, I still forget things, which is exactly why I have Rachel. On the first take of the bride reading her letter, I was recording at 30 frames per second instead of 24. Rachel caught it. I let her finish the read anyway, because the emotion was really good, and honestly the difference between 30 and 24 on one timeline is not massive and most people wouldn’t necessarily notice.
But they’re paying me money and I want to do a good job, so we asked if she’d read it again, and the second take was at the right frame rate. The emotion was still there.
So, hey, even we screw up. Now you know we’re total failures. It’s humbling.
The Dress Goes In The Small Room
She got into the dress in the other room, but we filmed the zip-up back in the smaller one, because even though that space is tight, the light in there is genuinely pretty, and we like the pretty light. That’s the whole decision. Pick the room with the good window, not the room with the space.
Where The Film Stands, And We Haven’t Filmed The Ceremony Yet
At this point in the day we’ve got the groom getting dressed, the bride getting dressed, hair and makeup, and both of them reading letters to each other. From a storyline perspective we are already doing really well, and the ceremony hasn’t even started.
That’s what makes prep coverage worth all this trouble: two people have now said, in their own words and their own voices, how they feel about this day. Add the ceremony and the toasts to that and the film is shaping up to be really, really good. It makes me happy.
Part 3 covers the ceremony: how we set up the cameras, how we set up the audio, the angles we use, and yes, whether I follow the bride down the aisle. Secret: I do.
