You’d be hard pressed to find a moment in which Car­ly and Mike aren’t bliss­ful­ly laugh­ing. It’s true — almost every shot in this film fea­tures a smile or laugh from either or both of them. That light-hearted ener­gy lends itself to cre­ate a beau­ti­ful­ly touch­ing film. Just like their wed­ding day, Car­ly and Mike’s sto­ry is sim­ply about cel­e­brat­ing their love and the peo­ple who stand by their sides sup­port­ing them.

When we first met the cou­ple, they were liv­ing in New­found­land and, although 2 years lat­er that’s no longer the case, they kept the water close to them on the wed­ding day by book­ing lake­side rooms for them­selves and their out-of-town guests at the West­in Toron­to. Car­ly and Mike had each sent us their vows and filled us in on their speech so we had a very good idea of just how inti­mate this film would be from very ear­ly on. From Car­ly’s poem reflect­ing on the start of their rela­tion­ship to their emo­tion­al vows, we knew we had a nar­ra­tive that their laugh­ter would bring to life. We want­ed our visu­als to be just as impact­ful as their sto­ry, so we made the deci­sion to shoot each key moment of the day in slow motion. Typ­i­cal­ly, this adds a lot of dra­ma to a scene, but in the con­text of Car­ly and Mike’s cel­e­bra­tion, it high­light­ed each light-hearted moment, bring­ing each sin­gu­lar laugh and smile to the foreground.

There’s things you can pre­dict and things you can’t pre­dict when it comes to a wed­ding day. Although we knew slow-motion was the right call for this sto­ry, we could have nev­er fore­seen just how pow­er­ful­ly the visu­als would com­pli­ment the nar­ra­tive and just how per­fect­ly it would cap­ture Car­ly and Mike.