The Wedding
Whitney & Rob's Wedding
About a week before my cousin, Whitney, was to marry the love of her life, I received a text from her asking if I could bring my film camera to record her walking down the aisle on her wedding day. It was a simple task: point, shoot, upload, and share. So, of course, I agreed. But what neither of us anticipated was how I would immediately start obsessively visualizing ways to make the documentation of her special day a little more special.
The Story
Following a hiatus of nearly two years since I had made anything cinematically noteworthy, in the midst of an already chaotic midterms week, and with only seven days to prepare, I used every second of my spare time re-familiarizing myself with aperture, ISO, white balance, LOG and CineStyle picture settings, and an ample variety of shot types and movements with every spare second I could find between my studies and soccer practices.
As a broke college student, there was nothing I could give her off the registry, but what I could do was give her a little more than what she asked for. Her wedding video became my gift to her and her soon to be husband.
Six days later I was driving down to Virginia with my family. My hefty camera bag packed with 2 Go-Pros, a gimbal, my trusty Canon EOS 7D, an old handheld video recorder, and more batteries and SD cards than I could keep track of was tucked neatly by my squished feet. My tri-pod, propped against the car window, poked me in the head with each bump the SUV hit, and the hard case of my drone sat on my lap protectively for four hours.
I was nervous. I knew she didn’t ask for anything special, but I wanted to blow her away. I wanted to blow myself away. The issue was that I would be filming the entire day by myself, trying to get every angle and every kiss without letting my hands shake or messing up the settings so badly that the footage would be useless in post production. I was nervous, but I was also excited. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the process of telling stories.
The day of the wedding was everything I expected: a solid mix of anxiety, chaos, and exhaustion. The ceremony was simple and small, and so was the reception. Immersing myself in the intimacy of the experience, I tried to record each tender moment with as much love as I felt myself while simultaneously running around like a chicken with my head cut off to diversify angles, shot types, camera movements, and lighting. When everyone was eating their late lunch, I was outside using my drone for establishing shots. While our friends and family were drinking champagne and mimosas, and dancing wildly in the center of the room, I was downing glasses of water and scrambling sweatily to track their moving bodies and goofy grins. Still, I was having just as much fun as they were. I think there is something beautiful about catching the groom looking longingly with love at his bride from across the room, unaware of my presence and my lens. Even the red faces of those I didn’t know who occupied my DSLR’s LED screen as they danced and sang and laughed, brought a smile to my own face. This wasn’t just a gift for my cousin, this was a gift for all of them.
Post-Production
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to review what I had captured for months due to my lack of hardware at school and an overloaded course schedule as I prepared to graduate from Villanova. Although my cousin reassured me to take my time and that there was no rush, I spent the moments I had before bed trying to visualize what my cameras could have possibly captured on that beautiful day.
Immediately after moving out of my college dorm I retrieved my SD cards from my camera bag and began downloading them on my home desktop (which is designated for my film, art, and writing but was too large to transport to my small 10’x10’ dorm room this year) before I even unpacked my bags. The amount of data being transferred onto my computer was overwhelming and took several hours. Still, I caught myself checking the slow progress of the loading bar with each suitcase I cleared out. But as the blue bar finally reached the end of its track and disappeared from my desktop screen, I abandoned everything to start watching, labeling, and organizing each clip into folders.
I knew the day of the wedding was going to be grueling, but I had forgotten post production was equally as frustrating and tiresome. It took 5 whole days of sitting at my computer to compose a sequence of shots that didn’t nearly justify the emotion of the wedding, of the joy and love, but was the closest thing I could get to reliving those hours again. In those 5 days I relearned the multitude of tools taking up every inch of my Adobe Premiere workspace, a workspace I had once navigated with ease and little thought. I struggled to color grade the flat, desaturated footage of my DSLR’s LOG picture style as I searched the internet, primarily youtube, for solutions to the problems that arose just as immediately as I solved them.
It was frustrating, but when I finally reached the end of my cousin’s favorite song on the timeline and was able to sit back and watch the full video for the first time, I was filled with the same emotions I had felt months before: unconditional love, kinship, connectedness, jubilee, and wholehearted celebration. As the screen faded to black, I yelled for my sister to come and see. She watched and I watched her, tears forming in both of our eyes. Again, I yelled for my mom this time and again, we cried.
When I sent the video to my cousin and the rest of the family my inbox became overwhelmed with appreciation and thanks. My aunt, the bride’s mother, texted me:
“I don’t know what to say about Whitney’s video. We really were just hoping to have film of her walking down the aisle… now we have this masterpiece! I had no expectations and I cannot thank you enough for all of your hard work. It’s absolutely perfect and you show the fun family event that we wanted to have! I was crying and laughing at the same time… you rock Brice. I cannot thank you enough. Love you sweet niece.”
Sure, the recognition and acknowledgement of my work felt good, but it was their joy that made me happiest. It was then that I was reminded again why I do what I do, why I create. I make videos and art not for me, but for others, not to make myself feel something, but for them to. The art of storytelling is the foundation of life, it is how we connect, it is how we remember, it is how we know we are alive and living. Telling a story isn’t easy, and stories aren’t always happy, but life isn’t either. I haven’t put down my camera since.
