Where do I even begin with Taylor and Andrea? I have known the two of them since way back in 2009, when we first started serving together on Impact Retreat’s executive staff. Taylor was in charge of publicity and Andrea was in charge of administration for Impact 2010, and then in 2011 they both went on to direct the whole retreat. Through all of that I was involved with Impact in one way or another, which means I had a front row seat to watch their friendship turn into something else.
Everybody else figured it out before I did. I was a little slow.
How I Know Them
The beauty of serving in a volunteer position like Impact is that you really do get to know the hearts of the other people in the organization, in a way that a job does not usually give you. There is a lot of pressure in it. You have to be incredibly organized and focused and driven, all at once, for months, for no money. The ability to actually pull it off comes from God, and I fully believe that only God’s hand makes Impact Retreat happen at all.
Whenever you spend that much time next to somebody under that much pressure, you find out who they are pretty quickly. So it did not come as a surprise at all when Andrea told me she and Taylor were dating. They had directed a retreat together. They were already good friends. Fast forward a few months and they both knew they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.
240 Hours
The address at the ceremony opens with something I love, because it puts a number on it. A year before this wedding, Taylor and Andrea were in the middle of a ministry event that ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 240 hours straight, and it marked the end of the partnership they had built serving incoming freshmen together.
That is Impact 2011, which ran ten days across three camp sessions for about 1,500 freshmen, and I was out there filming a chunk of it. Ten days is 240 hours. So the speaker sets up the parallel and then lands it: a year ago they finished one significant event together, and today they are starting another one, except this one does not end.
Filming People You Actually Know
Here is the thing I want you to take away from this one if you film weddings yourself.
I love filming a wedding like this, where I know the couple so well that I can anticipate how they are going to act and what they are going to say before they do it. I already knew their entire story, which made it enormously easier to tell that story back to them in the film. I knew that the 240 hours mattered. I knew where to point a camera during the ceremony because I knew who was going to react.
Now, I do not expect to be best friends with every bride and groom I film, and that would be a weird thing to require of people. But I do hope to know a couple well enough by the wedding day to understand how they got where they are and where they think they are going, because that is the difference between a video of a wedding and a film about two people.
Which is my long way of warning you that if you hire me to film your wedding, you should expect to answer a lot of questions and tell me a lot of stories. That is how we get to know each other, and it is how I am going to tell your story back to you.
Who Filmed It
This one was filmed at The Branch Church in Dallas, Texas. I shot it alongside Ashley Stineman and Philip Barrington, and the music is from Musicbed. You can also see the film on the FilmStrong page for this wedding.
Interested in having me film your wedding? Please contact me!