We love por­trait shoots with cou­ples because it allows us to add some depth to their wed­ding film that goes beyond the day itself. Although that’s some­thing we always try to do in all our films, it helps to actu­al­ly step out­side the day and do some­thing with a cou­ple that reflects who they are and allows their dynam­ic to shine through. David had men­tioned in pass­ing ear­ly on in our talks that he was teach­ing Adri­ana how to play ten­nis at one of their local courts. It’s some­thing that always stuck with us and as their por­trait shoot approached, we had an inkling that it would be the per­fect way to cap­ture them can­did­ly, so we sug­gest­ed it and they were more than down for it. But we weren’t aware how impor­tant that ten­nis shoot real­ly was until we post­ed a behind-the-scenes pho­to on our Insta­gram and David’s sis­ter men­tioned how much they were look­ing for­ward to it, and then on the wed­ding day, fam­i­ly mem­bers kept ask­ing us about the ten­nis shoot and how it would play with the wed­ding footage, and then David’s dad men­tioned ten­nis in his speech! The great thing is that we had decid­ed to make ten­nis a big part of their same-day edit — it was just a great theme that tied every­thing togeth­er. All we had to focus on on the day was film­ing shots that we could use to tran­si­tion between the wed­ding day and tennis.

We like to keep things can­did and stay one step ahead of the action instead of ask­ing our cou­ples to do any­thing oth­er than enjoy their wed­ding day as it unrav­els, but Adri­ana and David’s film might be one instance where we acci­den­tal­ly had a hand in the going-ons of the day — and we’re secret­ly hap­py we did. We ask a lot of ques­tions lead­ing up to the day, and in one e‑mail to David, we asked him whether their first dance would be chore­o­graphed or whether they would sim­ply dance. Look­ing back at it, this was prob­a­bly three days before the actu­al wed­ding day, but David e‑mailed us back say­ing that they might be doing some­thing a lit­tle more chore­o­graphed. We did­n’t know what to expect, and we did­n’t even know whether it’d be hap­pen­ing, but we had to plan out the arch for their same-day edit, so we planned for it hap­pen­ing and had a loose back-up plan in case it didn’t.

On the day of, both Adri­ana and David both told us they had stayed up all night prac­tic­ing a waltz-like chore­o­graphed dance, but they weren’t sure whether it was all that good. We had to see what we were work­ing with, so dur­ing some down­time in the after­noon, we asked them to just prac­tice their dance and filmed them look­ing up a few youtube videos on their phone and giv­ing it a whirl (in all sens­es of the word). We were com­plete­ly tak­en aback by what we saw and were hap­py that we had the cam­era on the Movi to cap­ture it all (and even hap­pi­er that we could pro­ceed with their same-day edit as we had orig­i­nal­ly planned).

We hopped on the Movi for their first dance at the recep­tion to match the look and feel of their prac­tice run in the after­noon and knew as we were film­ing it that we had some­thing mag­i­cal in our hands. It’s one thing to describe it, but we get the chills every time we watch the end of this film.

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