It's been awhile since I've had time to post here, but lately, I've started to think more about the meaning of it all. Creating wedding videos, that is. Life is a whole other subject. I have found it to be the hardest thing to explain what we do. I talk about intimacy and personality in video all of the time, but how do I define it? In my mind, intimacy is the still moments between the frames. It is silence between loudness. Film communicates by juxtaposing one clip with another. It is the arrangement of these clips that creates the feeling and communicates the emotion. The moments we capture - those are the vocabulary, but the arrangement of the moments makes the sentences.

How does this relate to Michael Jordan? And why are we reading about him on a wedding video discussion? Well, a lot of people think of him as the greatest basketball player because of the aesthetic of what we see. It was just downright impressive how powerful, fast, and graceful a player he was. So people remember moments. The slam dunk from the freethrow line. A leap in the air with an effortless spin as the ball rolls off his fingers into the basket. But I really feel that it was his instinct that truly made him great, and not the athleticism. He knew where to be. He knew when to shoot. He knew how to move. He knew what to do. It was the instinct telling him exactly what needed to be done that made the rest of his abilities meaningful.

And so it is with editing. Slow motion may or may not be good. Fast cutting may or may not be good. Black and white may or may not be good. I watch a movie at the theater, and when I see something particularly nice, I say "Wow! That was beautiful!" But I'm going to contend that this isn't what makes a film or a wedding video meaningful. It is the moments inbetween. The things you don't see. It is the decision to sequence one clip after another in a particular order and specific fashion that pulls us deeper and deeper into the moment. Arranged well, a video whether it is stylish and modern or traditional and classic, will hold up viewing after viewing. It will even become better with each viewing. Does the shooting matter? Of course. With no vocabulary, there is no communication. But it is the editing - the glue that binds the moments - that is the heart of it all.