How many times in life do you have the opportunity or excuse to have a film created about you? For most people the only time they hire a professional filmmaker is when they hire a wedding videographer.

Here’s how Rachel & Hieu approached us to make a truly unique wedding video.

When we were originally approached we knew that we were about to create something special. They reached out after having met us in person at a wedding expo and said they were drawn to the look of our weddings videos. When I had my first meeting with them, that’s when it clicked, they weren’t looking for wedding videographers, they were looking for artists to help them capture their love story in the moving image.

The Inspiration

I remember Hieu taking out a mood board covered with stills from films that they loved. There were glimpses of Everything Everywhere All at Once, works from Wong Kar-wai and one of my directorial heroes Hirokazu Koreeda. Koreeda was special to me because he was one of the first people I had really identified as a director. I had watched heaps of movies growing up but my mind was blown when I entered my first elective media class in highschool and learned that it was possible to make films yourself. Koreeda became a central inspiration for my VCE film after stumbling across Nobody Knows (2004) and discovering more of his works through a video essay by Kogonada.

You can tell a lot about a person by the art they’re drawn to. I could see that Rachel & Hieu found significance in quiet moments, they appreciated looks and subtle expressions. They were there for each other and their love came through in everyday promises.

I went to work exploring how we could bring this style and meld it with a wedding day.

We broke down all the technical artistry from the films they referenced, all the techniques and filmmaking approaches that we could. We know the look in particular was something that was very important to them.

These were the elements that felt were important to the visual style:

• Color & Contrast Curve
• Filmic Colors
• Carefully Composed Static Frames
• Step-printing
• Film Grain & Halation

Creating the Look

We captured their wedding day as we do most of our films on Blackmagic cinema cameras in a raw format. This allows us to do significant color-correction and image manipulation to bring out specific looks.

Our first test of getting this look was actually with photos for a pre-wedding photoshoot. The look of the images you get in camera are definitely in part due to the artist operating it but a equally large influence is the location.

We decided that the perfect place to capture the Asian cinema inspired imagery would be in Chinatown in the Melbourne CBD. This area was particularly significant to them as they’d had their first few dates in there.

So off we went, and these are some of the images that we got. The rich colors, the red glow (halation) around bright sources in the frame, that was all part of the look you’d get if you shot in Cinestill film which is a photographic film that seeks to mimic film used in motion picture cameras.

Up until this point in our journey as artists we’d really focused on just getting clean imagery. This gave us the push to explore more expressive, less clinical coloring. To get this photo look we used a photo editing plugin called Dehancer.

So with this test having gone ahead we planned for their wedding day.

Here’s some examples of the final style:

Color & Contrast Curve (Straight-From-Camera, Standard Color, Custom Film Color/Contrast Curve)

Carefully Composed Static Frames

Step Printing

Film Polish Without Distracting From The Day

Filmmaking is an art that often tries to make the meticulously planned look natural and coincidental. You write a script and have people say pre-decided lines with pre-decided reactions framed in pre-decided ways. How could we bring this sense of filmmaking polish to an event as spontaneous as a wedding?

Well you can’t do it completely without distracting from the day itself and we didn’t want to compromise their wedding day experience. We accepted that we would have a few opportunities to direct them but it had to be simple and we couldn’t ask them repeat things. If you direct a couple to do something once, it can be fun and make for some interesting memories, if you drag it out and or ask them to repeatedly do something you’re really making them work.

So if we only had a few times throughout the day to get specific shots, how would we capture the rest and make it feel like a cohesive film? We asked them for their private vows ahead of time and looked at how certain moments of the day could fit into that story-line and carefully planned how we could film it without significant direction.

The interviews you see are the result of a spontaneous choice. This was a single venue wedding at the beautiful Lancemore Mansion Hotel Werribee Park, and we had arrived a lot earlier than schedule to be able to scout out the locations we’d be shooting at. We were so ahead of schedule we were able to fit in these interviews while there wasn’t much happening.

In the end sticking to our technical guidelines for the style and being considerate about their story helped to create something that reached beyond their wedding day and will hopefully stay with them to remind them of their journey together forever.

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s their film: