This is a sim­ple sto­ry, and we love that. Why? Because with­in the sim­plic­i­ty of this nar­ra­tive lies a pow­er­ful theme — one that we can com­pli­ment with com­plex sequences of visu­als and audio and still not dis­tract from the mes­sage at hand. Those are our favourite sto­ries to tell.

With­in the sim­plic­i­ty of this nar­ra­tive lies a pow­er­ful theme — one that we can com­pli­ment with com­plex sequences of visu­als and audio and still not dis­tract from the mes­sage at hand.

Blan­ca and Alphonse met with us two win­ters ago in hopes of cre­at­ing a wed­ding film with a por­trait por­tion, shot before the wed­ding day itself, to real­ly cap­ture who they are as a cou­ple. Over the com­ing year, we talked about what made them them — what they liked to do togeth­er, what each had brought to the rela­tion­ship — and one theme we picked up on was their pas­sion for cook­ing and eat­ing togeth­er. We sug­gest­ed they cook some­thing for our shoot and we were delight­ed when they arrived at sushi. It was a sim­ple yet com­plex process with a lot of repet­i­tive tasks which would allow us to get cre­ative with our shots.

We kept it equal­ly sim­ple on the tech­ni­cal side of things. C100 Mark IIs on our Man­frot­to monopods allowed us to max­i­mize our cov­er­age while min­i­miz­ing our foot­print — a must when squeez­ing 4 peo­ple into a small kitchen. We focused on move­ment that accent­ed the action and always made sure to take a step back to ana­lyze each process and how to cap­ture it best. We main­ly stuck to our 24L and 35L, but hopped on the 135mm when we want­ed to hone in on spe­cif­ic actions that called for a lit­tle more focus and dra­ma — a deci­sion that so per­fect­ly cap­tured those small moments that Blan­ca and Alphonse described as spe­cial in their interview.

Some­times, it’s the unex­pect­ed ele­ments of a shoot that become the strongest aspects of the final piece, and that’s exact­ly what hap­pened here. When Blan­ca made the con­nec­tion to how cook­ing togeth­er feels as if they were shar­ing a slow dance, it gave us the per­fect tran­si­tion to their first dance on their wed­ding day. The moment we stopped record­ing that seg­ment, we knew we had a beau­ti­ful film on our hands, even before know­ing what the wed­ding itself had in store for us.

Sim­ply put, Blan­ca and Alphonse live in the lit­tle moments. Whether craft­ing sushi at home or shar­ing their first dance, each instant they spend togeth­er is equal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and there’s some­thing pow­er­ful­ly beau­ti­ful in that.

Come for the sushi, stay for the celebration.