Into the Wild — The making of a WedLuxe editorial.

It was at the busiest point of our 2015 sea­son that we took a 7‑hour road trip up to Tim­mins, Ontario to be a part of an edi­to­r­i­al shoot for Wed­Luxe Mag­a­zine. Lau­ra from Lau­ra & Co. had reached out to us and filled us in on the project — there was talk of fox­es, fal­cons, and the great north­ern wilderness.

We were con­vinced before we had even fin­ished read­ing the e‑mail and were ready to move heav­en and earth to be a part of this project.

So hav­ing just shot Andrea and Jef­f’s wed­ding on the Sat­ur­day, we charged our bat­ter­ies, backed up our cards, and packed to dri­ve up on Mon­day, shoot for the next two days, and come back for Thurs­day to get every­thing ready for Crys­tal and Jer’s on Friday.

We left around noon on Mon­day, tak­ing a small detour to Neo Cof­fee Bar for some good cof­fee and snacks. We had heard a lot about this place but hon­est­ly, it was love at first sip and is now one of our favourite cof­fee spots in Toronto.

3 hours out­side of Toron­to, land­scapes start to look real­ly beau­ti­ful and you start to ques­tion whether you’re even in Ontario any­more. We stopped for a small hike off the high­way with some jaw-dropping rock for­ma­tions. Things got a lot more awe-inspiring as the ride pro­gressed, but as roads got wet­ter and the day with­ered into dark­ness, we start­ed to real­ly feel the need to get to our des­ti­na­tion and refrained from stop­ping for any pho­tos. The pitch-black coun­try roads wind­ing through moun­tains and cliff sides mixed with the con­stant warn­ings of moose cross­ings made for a par­tic­u­lar­ly hor­ri­fy­ing com­bi­na­tion, but we made it there in one piece, albeit a cou­ple hours late (40km under the speed lim­it is our go to when things get scary).

The theme of the shoot was “Into the Wild” and our expe­ri­ence in this lit­tle north­ern get­away could­n’t have been a clos­er reflec­tion of that. In the few days that we spent up there, we encoun­tered land­scapes rem­i­nis­cent of the Group of Sev­en’s, crossed paths with a bear or two, held a cou­ple of fox­es, tried our palates with some beaver, and cap­tured some tru­ly amaz­ing peo­ple doing what they do best.

Brad from Ani­mals to Go and his falcon.

On the tech­ni­cal side of things, we want­ed the view­er to be able to eas­i­ly iden­ti­fy the set­up por­tions from the fin­ished sets with­in the film. Slow-motion is some­thing our Canon C100 Mark IIs are capa­ble of by shoot­ing in 60p and con­form­ing down to 24p in post — it’s some­thing we’ve always been inter­est­ed in doing but have nev­er had a project that called for it. So we decid­ed that we would shoot these fin­ished scenes in slow-motion on the Movi M5 — the epic results com­mu­ni­cate the grandeur of these sets that every­one is work­ing so hard to create.

The idea of the Into the Wild shoot was to com­bine mod­ern ele­ments with this theme of rus­tic wilder­ness. We want­ed the final col­or to be a reflec­tion of these oppos­ing ideas — a com­bi­na­tion of vin­tage film and the clean, sleek look of con­tem­po­rary cin­e­ma. The final look we decid­ed on was vibrant, rem­i­nis­cent of Super8 or Super16 film, but clean and sharp. We also added a bit of grain to each shot to refine that film aesthetic.

The edi­to­r­i­al was pub­lished in the cur­rent issue of Wed­Luxe Mag­a­zine and our making-of-film was fea­tured on their blog last week!

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