I met my wife at a smoothie and movie party. Of course I did not know she would be my wife in that moment, but I did feel an immediate connection. It ended up taking a year of friendship and two years of dating before we made our marriage official. I still remember that first moment our eyes met, and our first conversation.
Whenever I hear Gabriel talk about how he first saw Kaydrian, he speaks with the same fondness I do when I talk about how I met my wife. He was sitting in a speech class at college, no smoothies or movies in sight, when Kaydrian walked up to present her speech. To hear him describe it, you would think an angel floated in through a window while harps played and a children’s choir sang. It may not have been quite that dramatic, but it left an impression on his heart and his mind.
Her Version Is Less Heavenly
Kaydrian’s story of how they met takes a considerably less heavenly tone. She talks about public speaking the same way vegans talk about burger joints. Her quieter demeanour did not lend itself well to speeches, and she says she did not actually notice Gabriel at all while she was stumbling through her presentation.
That evening though, once the speeches were finished and she could relax, she happened to run into him at a bar. From then on they were inseparable, seeing each other every day, and not just in speech class.
Then a major curveball hit them. Gabriel’s company moved to Dallas and wanted him to move too, and he had to ask Kaydrian to uproot herself from all her close friends and family and come with him.
She said yes.
That was probably the second time Gabriel saw an angel and heard harps playing. It is also the second time I saw a similarity between their story and my own, because around the same time Kaydrian was pulling up roots and moving to Dallas for Gabriel, I was doing exactly the same thing for my soon to be wife, Rachel. I could not envision life without her.
Why This One Runs Nineteen Minutes
This is the full film rather than the highlight, and it is long, and I want to explain why rather than have you click off at minute three wondering what happened.
Almost none of this film is me. It is built on Kaydrian and Gabriel’s own voices, recorded separately, telling their own story in their own order, and the footage is cut underneath to follow them. Gabriel opens it by talking about a genuinely hard stretch of his life in the years before they met, which is not something a highlight reel has room to hold, and the rest of the film earns its length because of where it starts.
Whenever a couple gives you that much of themselves on an audio track, cutting it to ninety seconds is the wrong instinct. Some stories are a highlight. This one was not.
The Fireworks
And then there is the reception, which had actual fireworks over it.
Shooting fireworks at a wedding is one of those situations where the thing you want to film and the thing your camera can film are very far apart. The sky is bright, the couple underneath it is not, and if you expose for the fireworks you get two silhouettes, and if you expose for the couple you get a white smear overhead. What works is finding a position where something in the frame is lit by something else, so the couple reads against the burst rather than disappearing into it, and then holding the shot far longer than feels comfortable, because you cannot ask for a second run.
The night exit with the sparklers has the same problem and a much easier answer, which is that everybody is holding their own light source for you.
How It Was Shot
Shot with the Sony FS100, a Canon 7D and a Canon 5D Mark II. Edited in Premiere Pro CC. Coloured with Magic Bullet Looks.
Whenever I film a wedding it is so easy to get caught up in the day of the event, but it is worth considering everything that led up to it. The small decision to walk up and speak to somebody, which leads to the bigger decision to date them, which leads to the life changing decision to move cities and get married. I am glad I get to be a part of one of those moments.
If you want to see how I put a film like this together, that is the whole subject of my wedding film editing course.
You can also watch Kaydrian and Gabriel’s wedding highlight film below:
Interested in having me film your wedding? Get in touch!