Every time we sat down with Sarah and Mike, we’d some­how lose track of time and spend three hours hit­ting it off over cof­fee, or drinks, or piz­za — they’re just that much fun and easy-going. By the time the wed­ding day arrived, we were all just friends, hang­ing out and cel­e­brat­ing their wed­ding day — it just so hap­pened that we had cam­eras in our hands the whole time.

Over those lengthy talks, we dis­cov­ered a few things that we want­ed to cap­ture for their wed­ding film: 1) they com­pli­ment and con­trast each oth­er in the most per­fect ways, 2) their ener­gy is infec­tious, 3) their wed­ding par­ty was made up of friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers who were all very spe­cial to them and would play a huge role in the wed­ding day itself.

Anoth­er impor­tant thing to note is that they booked us to cre­ate a same-day edit for them. Now, although we approach same-day edits in the same way as our high­light films, they do require a whole oth­er way of think­ing and a lot more pre-production to ensure that we can put a strong piece togeth­er in a short amount of time. That means we ask a lot more ques­tions to ensure we stay two or three steps ahead of the action and have the flow and feel of the sto­ry almost entire­ly planned out before we arrive and start filming.

The truth is that we love same-day edits and we love the process of putting a sto­ry togeth­er on the day of and see­ing every­one’s reac­tion when it plays. Our first wed­ding ever was a same-day edit, so while we were learn­ing the ropes of how to even shoot a wed­ding, we were edit­ing the video away to play at the recep­tion. It was a tough day and we could talk about the loca­tions around Toron­to that were 45 min­utes away from each oth­er, the Gay Pride week­end traf­fic, the con­struc­tion on the major roads, or all those dif­fer­ent things that seemed to make every­thing that much hard­er, but it all became irrel­e­vant when the same-day edit final­ly played and we were able to wit­ness the impact that film had on the audience.

We’ve come a long way since that first sde. Nowa­days, there’s some very intri­cate plan­ning that goes into every same-day edit we put togeth­er, but the key is to embrace the advan­tage of know­ing exact­ly what you’re set­ting out to film. Going into the wed­ding day, we’ll already know what song we’re using, how we’re going to tran­si­tion between dif­fer­ent scenes, the sto­ry arch, and how the film con­cludes. All we have to do is fill each dif­fer­ent seg­ment with footage we’ve filmed, but know­ing all of that infor­ma­tion makes it pret­ty easy for us to do so.

For Sarah and Mike, we knew that music was a pret­ty big part of them, and their tastes fell into a sort of folky/chillwave/indie sound. We pushed our­selves to find a song that char­ac­ter­ized this sound, and, although not typ­i­cal­ly what you’d think of for a wed­ding film, Radi­a­tion City’s What Could You Do proved to be per­fect for them. We loved the song and it inspired us to take on a dif­fer­ent approach than we usu­al­ly would. One of the key lyrics is “What could you do with these hands, my love?”, which allowed us to make hands a theme through­out their film. From Mike’s hot shave, to Sarah’s make-up, the cou­ple hold­ing their cards to each oth­er, or sim­ply hold­ing hands in the limo after tying the knot — we knew we’d have all we’d need to pull it off, so we went for it and we felt it made the piece that much tighter, allow­ing the visu­als to play off of the audio and vice-versa.

When it all came togeth­er and we saw and audi­ence of 400+ peo­ple at their recep­tion laugh, clap, ohh and ahh along with the film, it made all the plan­ning and extra work entire­ly worth it. We always try to cre­ate some­thing that cap­tures the essence of the cou­ple and their sto­ry, and we think this is com­plete­ly Sarah and Mike — and their per­son­al­i­ties pushed us to go out­side of our com­fort zone and do things we would­n’t typ­i­cal­ly do. It real­ly takes get­ting to know a cou­ple inside and out to put some­thing like this togeth­er for them.

So with­out fur­ther a do, we hope you enjoy Sarah and Mike’s wed­ding film below!