One Thing You Must Do Before You Plan Your Wedding

09/01/2018 By

Now sure where to start with planning your wedding? Not sure how to even plan a wedding?

Welcome to the club.

Getting married isn’t something that you do everyday, and fingers crossed, it’s something you’ll only do once in your life – so it’s tricky to become an expert.

The second they get engaged a lot of people turn to the words best wedding planner: Pinterest and her sidekick Google.

It’s a solid first move – but we have a little challenge for you – what if you held off hitting the internet for some bride inspo and took a moment to work your way through these 7 questions…

Forget about everything you know about weddings.

Forget about every wedding tradition, Pinterest post, movie and magazine you’ve ever seen.

Close your eyes and think about the person you’re going to marry.

Picture their face and think about all the reasons why you can’t wait to spend the rest of your lives together.

Now imagine you’re going to commit and promise to spend the rest of your lives loving and laughing together.

What would you like to wear in that moment?

Where would you like to be standing when you take that sacred next step together?

When you turn around who’s faces do you want to see? Would you like to be there to witness these moments?

How would you like to make that commitment? With words or actions or ceremony?

What would you like to do before you make that commitment to each other? Would you like to be together or apart?

What would you like to do after you knit your lives together?

How would you spend your day if you were going to tie the knot with the person you love most in all the world?

If you answer to those questions is wear a white dress, walk down an aisle in front of 100 guests, do a formal ceremony followed by 15 mins of hugs with guests then a 2 hour photo shoot with a quick break before you make a dancing entrance into your reception dinner then dive into speeches, a cake cutting, a first dance and a bouquet toss that’s awesome and you should follow your heart and have your dream day. Seriously – it’s your day and you can throw your bouquet if you want to.

But if you’re like us and the traditional wedding didn’t match the way you’d like to celebrate exchanging vows then be brave and make the day your own.

As wedding videographers, we’ve filmed a lot of weddings and trust us, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE WEDDING POLICE. No one is going to come and check that your wedding is ‘up to code’ or that you have ticked all the boxes on your Pinterest board.

There are about two lines in the ceremony that you have to say to be legally married – the rest of the day can look however you’d like it to look.

So colour outside the lines – don’t follow tradition for tradition’s sake – make it a day that will mean something to both to you. We’re not suggesting that you throw out the romance or sacred aspects – but we are suggesting that you do things on the day that are meaningful to you and avoid doing things because that’s what people do or because you feel like you have to.

Personally – we love it when you can point to every aspect of your day and say why you chose to include that moment and what it meant to you.

Here’s a few of our special, meaningful features that we chose to include because our wedding wouldn’t feel like our wedding without them.

When we got married we thought a lot about what the day meant to us, and we really felt that our vows were the centrepiece for the day, so we designed the day and the entire wedding process around our vows.

Our wedding invitation was a 12-page booklet, set out like a A5 magazine, sharing our story from how we met, got engaged and what we love most about each other. We did this because a lot of Fyona’s extended family live interstate and wouldn’t have a chance to meet Dave before the wedding and a lot of Dave’s family hadn’t met Fyona yet (hello whirlwind romance) and invitations are really important to us, they set the tone for the day – plus we wanted to include our vows in the invitation – they were the centrepiece and we wanted to put them front and centre from the beginning.

Fyona doesn’t own a single white piece of clothing – it’s a colour she’d never pick for herself so for her – wearing a white dress wasn’t something she wanted to do so she didn’t. Her dress was a rich chocolate with purple tones – and it made her feel like a million bucks.

We wanted to see each other before the wedding, we’d never heard of a first look but we accidentally invented it ourselves, we wanted to spend time together because we didn’t want our wedding day to be a big production all about contrived emotions and set up moments – we wanted the day to start and end with just us. We met up with our parents before the wedding too – they’ve been dreaming of this day for a long time and we wanted to save some space just for them to spend time with us.

We met up with our bridal party at the venue. We asked our bridesmaids to wear whatever dresses they liked, and wanted their personalities to shine through, we did tell the boys to wear what they wanted but asked them to stick to blue, white and brown.

We caught a taxi together to the venue.

We didn’t have any flowers.

Our venue was an art studio filled with eclectic décor because after years and years of event management Fyona did not want to have to decorate the venue.

We walked in together and greeted our guests who were already mingling and enjoying drinks. Our friend married us, everyone gathered around in a circle and a friend of ours, who is an amazing artist, did a live painting of us as we exchanged our vows.

As soon as the vows were over Fyona burst into a flood of happy tears and that was the end of all the make up.

We took photos with our family and guests while canapés were served and everyone pulled up chairs, like a big lounge room, and laughed and cried their way through the speeches.

We did a first dance together to a song we claimed as ours and we asked the venue to make us a little red velvet cake with cream cheese icing because Dave had one condition – he wanted to eat cake on his wedding day.

The guests had polaroid cameras and the small intimate wedding of 50 guests lasted for 4 hours.

And then everyone left and we had a sit down dinner with our bridal party and parents. Our photographers finished up and we took our hair down, kicked out shoes off and enjoyed our first meal as Mr and Mrs with our favourite people in the whole world.

And then we stood on a street corner in Waterloo and hailed another taxi – and that was our wedding.

It probably shouldn’t be your wedding – but it was our wedding, because when we asked ourselves those questions all the answers we came up with lead us to creating our day in that way.

And we’re glad we did – because it was our day, and it wasn’t perfect, but it also wasn’t a mindless copy of someone else’s wedding that we saw on Pinterest and felt we had to recreate because that’s what you do.

Whenever we’re filming a wedding you can instantly tell when a couple have intentionally chosen what they want to include in their day and when they are just going through the motions – it shows up in a hundred tiny ways and, honestly, no matter what the style or the outcome, if the wedding has their personality stamped on it, if the whole day just feels like them then it’s always the best day ever – even if it’s traditional – you can feel the heart and soul in every detail and it’s a beautiful thing to capture.

So before you hit up Google, think about how you’d like to get married, and whatever that picture looks like do that – trust us, you won’t regret it.

Please get it touch if you’d like to chat further about how wedding videography could best capture your day.