I Put a Piece of Myself Into a Story That Isn’t About Me

One of the strange things about making wedding films is how much of yourself ends up inside something that ultimately belongs to somebody else.

I can spend days working on a film after the wedding itself is over.

There are hundreds of little decisions.

What stays.

What goes.

Where the story begins.

When the music should disappear.

When a moment needs room to breathe.

Sometimes I move something around a dozen times only to put it right back where it started.

By the time a film is finished, I know it almost too well.

And of course I want people to watch it.

Every filmmaker does.

But I don't think what I really want is for somebody to notice how much work went into it.

I want them to feel something.

I want a stranger who has never met these people to understand, even for a moment, why this day mattered.

That can be a strange thing to want in a world where most of us are scrolling quickly from one thing to another.

I do it too.

A wedding film appears on somebody's screen, and if they don't know the couple, there isn't much reason for them to stop and spend ten or fifteen minutes with two strangers.

I understand that.

But when somebody does stop and watch, I hope they find something human in it.

Because by the time I finish one of these films, I have put a lot of myself into it.

I am sharing a piece of my heart with every edit.

That probably sounds dramatic.

But I don't know another way to describe it.

Every edit carries my fingerprints.

What I noticed.

What I thought mattered.

What I chose to leave alone.

What I cut.

What I let breathe.

What I decided should come first.

What I thought the viewer needed to hear before they saw something else.

Those choices are personal.

They come from my instincts, my taste, my experience and the way I see people.

So yes, part of me wants somebody to notice the work.

I want them to understand that there was intention behind it.

But that is where this job gets strange.

Because if I really do it well, they should stop thinking about me pretty quickly.

They should get pulled into the people in front of them.

They should laugh because somebody in the film made them laugh.

They should feel something because of what a father said, or the way a mother looked at her daughter, or because two people said something honest to each other.

At some point, the filmmaking should get out of the way.

The work is mine.

The story isn’t.

That is the balance I am always trying to find.

I have to bring something to the film.

Otherwise I am just assembling clips.

But I also have to know when to get out of its way.

I don't want every wedding to bend itself around my style.

I don't want every couple to end up inside the same formula just because something worked well in the last film.

The challenge is figuring out what belongs to this story.

Sometimes that means letting something stay quiet.

Sometimes it means using a moment I never would have planned.

Sometimes the thing I thought would be important on the wedding day barely matters once I start editing.

And something tiny becomes the center of the whole film.

That part still surprises me.

I can go into an edit with an idea of what the story is going to be.

Then the people in it tell me I was wrong.

And honestly, I like that.

I don't want the film to feel like me with different people dropped into it.

I want it to feel like them.

My job is not to make their story fit my style.

My job is to find the style that fits their story.

Maybe that is why finishing a wedding film feels so personal to me.

By the end of it, I know every choice I made.

I know the moments I almost used.

I know the ones I kept coming back to.

I know where I struggled.

I know where it finally clicked.

And then I hand it over.

At that point, it is not really mine anymore.

That is probably the hardest and best part of making something for somebody else.

You put your judgment into it.

Your taste.

Your instincts.

A little bit of your heart.

Then you let it go.

And if I did my job right, the couple is not thinking about any of that.

They are just watching their story.

I put myself into the work so they can find themselves in it.

I think that is one of the reasons weddings have held my attention for so long.

I am never just trying to make something that looks good.

I am trying to understand these people well enough to make choices that feel true to them.

That keeps the work from becoming mechanical.

The cameras may be familiar.

The timelines may look familiar.

A lot of the problems are definitely familiar.

But the people are different every time.

And that means the film has to be different too.

Maybe that is why, after all these years, I can still get completely wrapped up in an edit.

I can still get frustrated when I cannot find it.

And I can still feel that little rush when suddenly everything falls into place.

Of course I want people to watch my work.

I probably always will.

But I don't need them to see me in it.

I need them to see themselves.

I don’t need them to see me in it.

I need them to see themselves.