A groom who counts the days precisely, a bride starting her greatest adventure, and one of the craziest receptions I have ever filmed. Sarah and Chris in Dallas.
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Early in 2017, my wife Rachel and I were visiting her aunt and uncle in Austin. They remarked that their son Henry had recently begun dating a girl, and already the “M word” (marriage) was being thrown about. A few months later we were sitting with Henry and his Fiance Victoria over chips and queso (the best thing to eat at a meeting), talking about filming their wedding in Colorado this November.
Having spent these past months getting to know Victoria, Rachel and I were excited to not only film her and Henry’s wedding, but also to now be related to her. Getting married? We would love to film your wedding, no matter the location. Please get in touch!
📷 Favorite Wedding Filmmaking Gear
Caitlin and Tanner warned Rachel and me that there would be tears at their wedding. I didn’t know how true this would be until we showed up and Tanner started tearing up while reading a letter that he wrote to Caitlin, to which she soon followed suit when she read hers as well.
This tearful trend continued throughout the day, with the culmination point being when they saw each other for the first time. Even as Tanner heard Caitlin’s footsteps, happy tears began to fall. Looking back, it may be easier to list the parts of their wedding where someone wasn’t crying.
Couples like these two are why Rachel and I film weddings. We are so thankful that they let us share and capture these moments with them.
Getting married? Whether you’re a cryer or not, we would love to film your wedding. Please get in touch!
Want to learn to film weddings? I’m now offering one-on-one filmmaker consulting! Check it out!
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Edited using Adobe Premiere Pro. Download a free trial!
Music used in this film:
🎵 Write My Name Alt. Version by CHPTRS
Songs licensed from Music Bed
Music licensing sites I recommend:
I’m required to state that I’m a part of affiliate programs for Amazon, B&H, SoundStripe, ArtList, Musicbed, and Adobe and that some of the links above are affiliate links.
For Zac and Lindsey, it was the quiet moments that Rachel and I wanted to capture the most.
Their wedding absolutely had loud in it. There was dancing, some genuinely crazy moves, and an exuberant shout of joy the second they were pronounced husband and wife. But for every one of those, there was an equally small and more intimate moment that nobody saw except us and them.
In place of funky dance moves, there were warm embraces in the sunset. And though nobody knew it at the time except the handful of people standing closest to them, their pronouncement of marriage included the two of them whispering “no, I love you more” back and forth to each other.
That’s the whole film, right there in one line. That’s why it’s the title.
The film opens on the two of them writing and reading letters to each other, which is my favorite way for a wedding film to start. You get the couple’s own voices, saying their own words, before a single guest has arrived and before anybody is performing for a room.
If you’re a couple reading this and you’re wondering whether it’s worth the time to write something down, it is. It’s the single best thing you can hand your filmmaker, and you get to keep it either way.
Corpus Christi gives you the Gulf, palm trees, and light coming off the water that you cannot fake anywhere inland. Everything about the day sat against that.
Filming a wedding like this is mostly a question of where you decide to point the camera. The big beats take care of themselves. Somebody is always going to catch the aisle and the first kiss and the cake.
The quiet ones don’t announce themselves. A couple leaning into each other for two seconds while everyone else is looking somewhere else, a hand on a back, something whispered that you can only tell happened because of what her face does right after. You get those by staying with people longer than you think you need to, and by keeping a long lens on so you’re not standing on top of them whenever it happens.
Cut in Adobe Premiere Pro and color graded with my LUTs.
📷 The whole kit lives here: my favorite wedding filmmaking gear. The pieces that did the most work on this day:
Whether you’re loud and wild or quiet and intimate, or honestly both at different hours of the same day, we would love to talk about filming your wedding. 🎥 Please get in touch.
And if you’re the one filming: 🎬 my wedding film editing course covers how a film like this gets built, ►► my free guide to booking more wedding clients is a free download, ✌ the Learn Wedding Filmmaking Facebook Group is where the rest of us are, and I also offer one-on-one filmmaker consulting if you want to sit down and talk through any of it.
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.
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.
And if you’re a filmmaker, my whole edit process is in Wedding Film Framework, there are a few thousand of us in the Learn Wedding Filmmaking Facebook group, and my free guide to booking more wedding clients is here whenever you want it.
Noah and Mallorie started dating in middle school and have spent a third of their lives together. This is the long version of their wedding film, with room for the moments the trailer could not hold.
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