It was clear very quick­ly that this day was very impor­tant to Michelle and Lee. Yes, the wed­ding day is impor­tant to every cou­ple we cre­ate a film for, but for Michelle and Lee, the wed­ding day itself became their sto­ry. The process of lit­tle things com­ing togeth­er into some­thing grande is one we can iden­ti­fy with as film­mak­ers, where a lot of relat­ed and unre­lat­ed shots and sto­ry­lines inter­weave into the final prod­uct. In the same way, this wed­ding day is about a lot of dif­fer­ent per­son­al, hand­craft­ed details com­ing togeth­er to cre­ate a beau­ti­ful ambiance — and that’s exact­ly what we set out to show.

But like in most of our films, we want­ed to dig a lit­tle bit deep­er to make some­thing tru­ly per­son­al for Michelle and Lee. The cer­e­mo­ny and recep­tion were tak­ing place at Ever­green Brick­works in Toron­to, a for­mer quar­ry and indus­tri­al site trans­formed into a com­mu­ni­ty envi­ron­men­tal cen­tre. The park is an exem­plary pil­lar of green liv­ing, teach­ing cit­i­zens ways to live a lit­tle bit more sus­tain­ably. Regard­less of where you look in this space, you will see ways in which nature and human-made struc­tures exist in per­fect bal­ance. Brick­works is a site that Michelle and Lee con­stant­ly vis­it to walk on the trails, and Lee him­self filled us in on a bit of its his­to­ry, so we knew the space would be a cen­tral char­ac­ter with­in this story.

So in our estab­lish­ing shots, and through­out the entire film, whether it’s at Ever­green or in their con­do down­town, we worked in this bal­ance between nature and humans wher­ev­er pos­si­ble. Some­times we got incred­i­bly lucky, such as when a lady­bug is crawl­ing on the trail­er door near the begin­ning of the film, but most of it we had to look out for and shoot with intent. We found the whole idea of com­ing to this space and hav­ing a wed­ding allowed for a lot of this imagery to occur nat­u­ral­ly — and that made it real­ly easy for us.

We’ve prob­a­bly seen this a mil­lion times as it came togeth­er, but we can’t get enough of how beau­ti­ful the play between the green and the indus­tri­al trans­lat­ed into the final film.

Enjoy!