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Earlier this month, I had the plea­sure of film­ing Geneviève and Jamie on their wed­ding day. It was a beau­ti­ful out­door cer­e­mony in the coun­try with only about 50 peo­ple, and a vegan din­ner for the reception.

One of the inter­est­ing things I got to see was the sock dance, an old French-Canadian tra­di­tion where the eldest unmar­ried sib­ling has to don a pair of ugly socks (sym­bol­iz­ing their cold feet) and do a silly dance. People throw money at him or her, which is then col­lected for the newly mar­ried couple.

I decided to keep the grad­ing nat­ural cause there are so many vibrant colours in each scene — from tat­toos, hair dye, clothes, foliage, and dec­o­ra­tions — that I wanted to bring out for a light­hearted, play­ful mood. Goddammit I love grad­ing; it’s become my favourite part of the process. You can set so many kinds of tones with colour alone.

The colours also led me to decide on using Beirut’s “Postcards from Italy” for the song, as the ukulele and horns empha­size that fes­tive feel­ing wonderfully.

I also got to work with Liz, a pho­tog­ra­pher who’s as fan­tas­tic1 as she is con­sid­er­ate. So far, she’s been the only one to say to me, “Tell me if I get in your way”, before I could say it to her. Guess who I’m refer­ring if any­one asks me for a wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher recommendation.

Sometimes I study the films of video­g­ra­phers I admire, and I’m inspired by their style but it never feels right when I try to achieve the same for my films. They rely on edit­ing to make their films inter­est­ing, and the films end up look­ing posed or unnat­ural. I’ve real­ized that I have to fol­low my own style — telling a story by cap­tur­ing the beauty in the sim­plic­ity — because that’s what I’ve been try­ing to do in words and pho­tos my whole life.

  1. She has a pre­view on her blog. [↩]