When my sister got engaged, I commited to doing a short documentary about the history of her relationship to John Thomas (JT) English the Third. I learned a lot about my sister and now-brother-in-law. And I learned a lot about filming. They met in a King Soopers grocery store in Colorado, but King Soopers staff wouldn’t let us film there. So we ran down to a gas station at midnight, and the clerk said, “yeah do whatever you want.” So we filmed in the candy isle of a gas station convenience store. I shot the entire thing in 10 minutes, with an average two takes per shot.

I had never done a re-enactment before, so this was a grand experiment, and a mistake actually. I was editing the piece, wondering what visuals (archive photos from their college albums, etc) I might have to use with the finished audio segment I had edited together. Then I got the hot idea to just have them say certain lines from the edited audio, and I would try and sync the movement of their mouths on top of their interview audio segments. So that was the starting point.

Then with the approach decided, I had to come up with a shot list. So I just listened to the audio segment play back, and just started linearly writing down in my head how it might play back. I often do this when listening to This American Life, a radio program that is one of the most visual forms of journalism out there, in my opinion. I digress. So I came up with a linear shot list, and some of the shots had a quote or two that I wanted them to say. I had, for instance, written down on a post-it, “over Macy’s shoulder, get JT coming around isle, checking Macy out.” When we filmed the shot, after two takes, I knew I had what I needed. So editing was super easy, just setting in and out points.

The other cool thing about this was that as a re-enactment, I got to use the real people, and they got really into it. So it might classify as a ‘docudrama’, but hey, whatever the case may be, it was fun, and got some good laughs at the wedding reception.

I have to thank, of all people, the New York Times for supplying some great ideas and inspiration from their series of wedding videos entitled “Vows.”

~Chris.