This is Chris and Rachel’s full wedding film, shot in downtown Dallas on a cold, rainy, thoroughly uncooperative day, and I want you to notice how little the weather ends up mattering.
The first line in the film isn’t a vow or a toast, it’s somebody off camera saying “Rachel, are you gonna make it through this?” and then, a beat later, “that’s all right, I may cry with you.” That’s the whole day in about four seconds. Everybody in that room came in already knowing they were going to lose it, and nobody was fighting it.
Rachel counted it out in her vows: 501 days earlier she was sitting somewhere being anxious about a first date with a guy she already had a feeling about, and by the end of that night she knew. Which is the kind of thing that sounds like a line until you hear the two people who were standing closest to it tell the same story from opposite sides.
Her best friend says that whenever Rachel announced after one week of dating that she was going to marry Chris, she told her flat out that she was crazy. His friend says Chris called him right after that first date, called him again a week later, insisted everybody meet her, and then pulled him aside at a bar to say he thought she was the one. Same week. Two phone calls, one eye roll, and both of them were right.
The line I keep coming back to is from Chris’s letter. He tells her that the smile she’s used to seeing on him is a new one, that it’s an outward, uncontrolled expression coming from a brand new source of joy, and that it comes from the completeness he feels with her. And then he lands it with “I’m not yet the man I want to be, but with this smile on my face, I’m that much closer.” A groom wrote that. Out loud. In a room full of his relatives.
From a filming standpoint there is nothing clever going on here and that’s deliberate. Whenever the words are this good, the job is to stay out of their way, get a clean microphone on the people saying them, and spend the rest of your attention on the faces of everyone who is listening. Half the shots in this film are of people who aren’t talking.
Then the reception happened and the rain outside stopped being a topic entirely.
Music and Gear
The two songs in this film are “Refuge” by Drew Alan and “Set The Night on Fire” by Travelist, both licensed through Marmoset. The film was cut in Adobe Premiere Pro and graded with my own WhoisMatt LUTs. If you want the full list of what I carry to a wedding, it’s all at kit.co/whoismatt.
If you’re getting married and you want a film like this one, we’d love to talk about it. Get in touch over at filmstrong.com.
And if you’re a filmmaker who wants to cut wedding films like this, I teach my entire edit process in Wedding Film Framework, I hang out with a few thousand other wedding filmmakers in the Learn Wedding Filmmaking Facebook group, and you can grab my free guide to booking more wedding clients whenever you want it.