Music. Music. Music.
We love it. Music has the ability to engage every part of the human brain. It can pull us back to place, a taste, or even a smell. At our house we usually have music playing all day long. There is a sound track to our lives. Most days it’s a Pandora station set to Iron and Wine or Lord Huron, but Saturday mornings usually call for 80’s dance party. Sunday mornings are for Yacht Rock… (Don’t know what Yacht Rock is? Stop everything and look it up! … I’ll wait.)
All that to say, how in the world do we pick out music for a video like a forever wedding video? I’ll start by saying it’s not easy. Well, not for me. I spend hours going through music on music bed and other sites where we can purchase the rights to use an artists music. I usually have an idea in my head of what I feel fits the couple and their wedding day. After I find it I start the video making process.
Trying to match the cadence with the movement of clips and watching for rises and falls that are appropriate visually. Sometimes I get half way and I trash it. I go back to looking for music because it just didn’t feel right. In the many years and the hundred or so videos I’ve made, only three times have I gotten the music wrong (knocking on the wood desk I type from).
In fact, the video below was one of them. I gave it a very slow romantic song and when Janette got the video it didn’t speak to her the way I had hoped. She was incredibly kind as she gently reminded me of the specific song we had discussed in earlier emails months before the wedding. Luckily, the song she wanted was available for purchase.
You may be saying, “Wait… I can pick the song?” You sure can, just as long as I can get rights to the copyright. The song matters a lot and I want the couple to looooooove the selection! After each wedding video is complete, I send it to the couple password protected. The couple then gets a chance to speak into it. Is there something they would like to see more of or less of? Maybe the best man brought a date that they knew wasn’t gonna last and they don’t want her in the forever video. Whatever it is, I’ll do our best to accommodate because I want the video to be perfect!
My hope is that years later the couple will sit down and cry as they watch the beauty of their day. That somehow, they’ll be transported back for a moment. Wedding videos have an amazing ability to remind us of the pure simplicity of our love. In the beginning before house payments, diapers, and silly arguments about what to eat … There was a day where we stood in front of the people we hold closest in our lives and made a vow. An innocent moment of giving all we knew of ourselves to all we knew of the other.
David
