It's easy to get excited about filming a wedding in the Florida Keys with a sunset backdrop and fire jugglers and junkanoo performers and fireworks over the ocean. What's even more exciting is when the couple is genuinely rediscovering true love through each other. For us, a visually-stunning wedding is nothing without a story of heart and soul.

We've been so excited to share Rhett and Nicole's wedding highlights video, but we had to wait until after it premiered at their 2nd wedding reception back in Ohio. Well, without further adieu, here is their wedding highlights video. Enjoy!

Rhett + Nicole | Wedding Highlights | Serendipity Studios on Vimeo

Great shooting and great editing.All my compliments!!
What dd you use for shooting and editing and wich Glide and Steady?
Can u give me the author and title of the Music u used please?
Thanks a lot
Gianni from Italy

Totally loved the sunset and last shots but felt there were too many tracking shots and not enough shots or connection with the couple. I like to watch a clip and feel like I know the couple really well by the end of it. But then with a location and weather like that, I can see why you deviated :)

Absolute masterpiece Travis!

Travis, I knew there was a reason for you moving to FLA! Extraordinary work as usual.

Truly exceptional work!

Gianni | Thanks for watching. We use Canon 7D's and a Canon 60D on our productions. We use Final Cut Pro for editing. For tracking and flying shots we use the Cinevate Atlas 10 and the Steadicam Merlin respectively.

Richard | Thanks for the comments. We used more tracking shots in the beginning of this video because it fits so well with the mood and pace of the music. Those shots were preplanned weeks before the wedding. Regarding the bride and groom, they basically got ready by themselves and didn't do a first look or a photosession together ... and both of them were also fairly quiet and reserved. So I think that may be why you felt the way you did. Personally I think the bride's heartfelt words at the end really opens their story to the world, but maybe not everyone catches that.

Nicholas | Thanks!

Don | You know it! I love FL .. everything about it ... well, except that people don't know how to drive.

Roger | Thanks, buddy!

3:52 = The Oscar-winning shot! Unreal!

Thanks Travis for your answer, not videocamera at all, only DSLR.Do you think is a risk.
Particularyconcerning the change of the lens when you are not quite like a wedding,did you find problems about that and wich lens you use?
I also asked the title and the author of the song that I like a lot
Thanks
Gianni

Dimitris | Thanks!

Gianni | Yes, it's a bit more risky using DSLR versus traditional videocamera. For us it is worth the risk. Regarding lenses, the key is to have a plan on what lens you will use in what situation. Believe it not, we only use a handful of lenses when we shoot. There is a lot of talk right now about having a bagful of primes and changing lenses all the time. We don't take that approach. Also, regarding the music, that's one of the few things I won't discuss. d;-)

Agreed, shots around 3:40 are beautiful. Great work, and awesome wedding. love the shot at 2:10 with the shadow. It shows that you put your heart into it.

Wich lens you use?I think that u have one camera with one kind and other with another, but wich one?
Travis why not for the music?I think that nothing change in your job if in other country sombody use the same.:-))

Greg | Thank you so much. We do pour our hearts into every wedding we film. Thank you so much for noticing and for the comments. d;-)

Gianni | Please just respect my decision not to discuss music. Thanks. As for lenses, we used 5 lenses on this shoot (although 1 of them was used for only 1 shot). Our 'go-to' lenses are the Canon 17-55mm 2.8, the Canon 24-70mm 2.8 and the Canon 70-200mm 2.8. We also used a Tokina (I think) 11mm for one shot and a Sigma 100mm macro for a few shots.

Wow all fast lens...all 2.8.....but you have 2 lens for one camera and 3 for other or do you change during....you need time for that...also to put the camera on the Glide or on the Steady...how many people work with you?
Ok for the music...I respect you but I like a lot....a lot..

We shoot with 4 cameras and 2 people. We alternate the lenses between the cameras as necessary during the day, but we try to limit the switching to avoid getting dust or debris inside the camera. During the ceremony for example, we may do one lens change or none depending on the setup. For Steadicam we use the Canon 17-55mm.

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

Awwwyeahhhh. d;-)

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.

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

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;-)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

thats a pretty risky ring shot :)

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.

Victor | The macro helps make it look riskier than it was. d;-)

Zhong | You're welcome. I love helping others. Regarding your question, the best thing you can do in a situation where you're lacking enough light is to ... add more light. During that fireworks scene we had an LED light set up off-axis to give some extra light on their faces. We also had a studio light some distance away (probably about 60 feet) hitting them from behind with some extra light.

Obviously you can also up your ISO and drop your shutter and open your aperture full-wide, but sometimes it's just DARK and you're not going to get good results without adding light. You can also try the Neat Video software as it does a good job of increasing exposure and reducing noise. We don't use it but we've heard good things about it.

Thanks, Travis, awesome insight as always!

With a studio light, do you find it takes too long to set up or gets people upset with the bright light? Is it something you have to plan in advance, so you get the shot you need, then turn it off quickly?

Also, where were you able to get electricity/outlet to power a studio light outdoors?

It takes maybe 5 minute extra to set up a light, and we take care to set it up so that it's not going to annoy the guests. We also generally only use the lighting for major events like the first dance and so forth, but we take care to judge the crowd too. Sometimes you can just leave the light on and everyone will just keep dancing and not even care. Sometimes you need to turn it off. As for power, we just ran an extension cord to an outlet inside a building that was near the beach. We also have on-camera lighting we can put on stands or on cameras if needed.

Thanks for the confirmation, I've been wanting to stay away from lights as much as possible, but seems that just not possible with the current technology yet in dark scenes.

I can't stop watching your video either - probably watched it 20x now! And I notice more and more amazing stuff each time. For example, this time around, I noticed that you had a subtle slider shot of the audience sitting in the chairs during the ceremony as well as a dolly in shot with the rose petals on the ground at the couple at the front.

How were you able to manage these slider shots during the ceremony? Especially the dolly in shot with the rose petals - I'm guessing you were situated in the middle of the aisle for this shot, which was permissible since it was outdoors and not in a church?

But the bigger question is what kind of ceremony camera set up do you use? I was thinking the standard 3 camera setup, all on tripod (middle back of aisle, then right and left up front). But if I go with that setup, I don't see how I could possibly achieve the subtle slider shots you got during the ceremony? Care to share how you accomplished that?

Thanks Travis! Great job again.

We use anywhere from 4-5 cameras while shooting a wedding ceremony, which leaves us free to dedicate one camera to more creative shots. That said, I only work with a single assistant and we work together to keep all of the cameras shooting what we want. It's not easy but it works well for us. d;-)

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.

Zhong, if you're not going to use a video light than you need a faster lens. 1.8, 1.4 or 1.2s.

Michael is right, although the DOF is so shallow below 2.0 that you'll likely have a nightmare keeping focus on a moving subject.