Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

you kill it!!!
brother!!!!!!

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Awwwyeahhhh. d;-)

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Nice job... i do agree about the beggining..slides..could be tide r. Oh man...that's my favorite band "Muse" I love that piece..i thought it was perfect for weddings..I was waiting for the right one...you beat me to it. Oh well...you used it well.

thanks.

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Travis you work is always a standard of reference to me. I just bought a Canon 60D (with the 17-55mm 2.8 lens) myself to use for weddings as a secondary camera to my Sony Z5. The manual focus though of a DSLR is a "pain" but I guess, practise, practise, practise.

stelios

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Stelios, you're going to love the 60D and the 17-55 2.8. Great combo. Focus on a DSLR is definitely more challenging but also worth the effort. You'll do fine. d;-)

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

can someone tell me how you get these amazing ring shots? what lenses you use, etc? thanks

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

We were using a 100mm macro, but we just purchased a 12mm extender tube which is supposed to turn any lens into a macro, but much cheaper and smaller to store in your gear case. We'll see how it works out.

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

OK cool I am getting the 25 extension tube instead of getting an expensive macro lens since I'm only interested in very few macro lens. This tube is the perfect solution for me.

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

I really love how you control the flow of the video from the start to the end! Those shots of the B&G in sunset were killer! How did you get such a nice slowmo using 7D/60D? The framing seems very smooth.

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Love this video. Keep watching it :) What were your settings for the time lapse in the end with the sunset?

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Victor | Just had our 12mm tube arrive today but haven't had time to play with it yet. Glad you keep watching the video. That means we did our job. d;-) As for the settings during the sunset, I don't really recall exactly. I know we were at a low ISO like 160 and probably wide open (like 2.8) and using a pretty high shutter to control the light. We want the aperture to be full open to get high DOF so the sun would be really soft in the background. This helped draw the main attention to the rings.

Johannes | Thank you! A lot of thought definitely went into how to best use this song in terms of pacing. For example, we didn't even touch the Steadicam until the bridal entrance because we knew that was going to be our big shot for the crash of the music. The slo-mo at the end was all 60fps on the 60D and 7D and then conformed back to 24fps to give 50% slo-mo. We pretty much never use slo-mo but it just felt like the ending of this song was perfect for it, so we planned it out in advance weeks before the wedding.

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Travis, inspirational work as always! Always admire your videos.

I like your approach - planning shots before the actual day, but I'm curious what that actually entails? Do you choose the song well before the actual wedding day, then think about what shots you would need for which parts of the song?

How do you ensure such a shot will be available to you during the actual wedding day? Do you go, "We need a tracking scenery shot," so you look for opportunities during the day to grab that shot? Or do you very specifically block/frame/stage the shot and already know the content (i.e. water, dancing in sunset, steadicam around the fire jugglers, etc.) before the actual day?

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Thanks for watching!

For the most part we choose music after the wedding day, not before. Our thinking is that you don't really know exactly how the wedding day will play out until you've been through it. However, we're experimenting with a change of philosophy right now, where we will tentatively choose a song before the wedding that we think will fit the couple and their wedding. Then, if after the wedding it doesn't quite fit we will just choose something else.

To answer your questions regarding this wedding, we were 99% sure that we would be using this song. It just felt perfect for the couple and their personal story, and perfect for the wedding they had planned. So in a sense, we treated this somewhat like a SDE. We picked the song and then pre-planned where we thought certain parts of the day would fit best. We had some specific shots in mind beforehand, like the shot of the rings with the waves, and all of the sunset shots. We did our research of the location online and knew that it was on the west side of the island and should have an awesome sunset. We also knew they had this tiny dock and knew we wanted the couple out on that dock during sunset, and especially a shot featuring this iconic bent palm tree that Pierre's is known for. We also knew we were going to use those shots at the end of the song, with the music slowing down, so we wanted to shoot for slo-mo. So everything during that sequence was shot at 60fps for that.

The tracking scenery shots at the beginning were semi-planned. I knew based on the pacing of the music that I mostly wanted tracking shots and not static shots because it would fit the energy of the music better. Normally we use very few tracking shots, so this was different for us. However, we didn't have any of those shots specifically planned. We just drew inspiration on the day of shooting.

The opening water shot was a moment of 'Serendipity' you could say. I was on the boat with the bride and her guests and got the idea to shoot the water. As you can imagine it was a very difficult shot to achieve given the length of the shot and the fact I was shooting on a moving boat over waves, but the end result was breath-taking I thought. Back in the studio I decided to open with the shot because it was so beautiful and dramatic and because it also feels like you're being led into the resort over the water.

Regarding steadicam, we use it pretty sparingly usually. I knew from choosing the song that I wanted a steadicam shot of the bride walking in and that this would be the first steadicam shot of the video. The music just called for it. As she was walking in I was searching for the best creative angle and decided to start on the shadows and use them as a reveal. For the reception I knew we wanted a good dose of steadicam because of the energy of the song we were using. I also knew I wanted a transition where the fireworks ended and we revealed the sunset session.

So as you can see, certain parts were planned, certain parts were semi-planned and certain parts were left completely to our own inspiration. I do want to point out that we are big believers in 'authentic' story-telling. There seems to be a trend in our industry to approach weddings more as movie producers and get the big shots versus the 'real moments'. That's not what we do. We employ planning and some limited setup and focus on capturing the real event.

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

thats a pretty risky ring shot :)

Re: Rhett + Nicole | MUST SEE Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios
 

Travis, thanks for your detailed response! It's going to help me a lot.

I did an event the other night at a very dark lounge with the 7D and fast Canon 2.8 lens (17-55 and 70-200mm IS), but nearly ALL my shots came out horrible - it was so hard to focus even with an 8" monitor, not to mention that the darkness was overwhelming, even on 6400 ISO (horrible noise, I know...but I didn't know what else to do) and even 1/30 shutter speed. We shot wide open on 2.8, but all our footage came back useless.

Everything was simply too dark. I imagine your outdoor scene at night watching the fireworks and the fire jugglers must have been very dark as well. How did you manage to get such clean images, exposed so your can see their faces, no real noticeable noise, sharp focus, etc? Did you use a video light? We didn't have one.