lately

Bonjourno friends!

We've been a little quiet around these parts lately, but for good reason! We wish to lovingly introduce the newest addition to our family, baby Elsa! Look at that cuteness, at that cuddly squishiness!

So we've obviously been busy bees. Elsa is doing very well, and Rowan is taking to her quite nicely, which is a relief.

BUT. That doesn't mean our wedding season has been put on hold. We have a few weddings booked for the upcoming summer, both in Peterborough and Nova Scotia. Yes, indeed, we're traveling back to the beautiful east coast for not one, not two, but three weddings! It's going to be a handful to juggle, but we still love Halifax, so we're happy to make it work. 

We have a couple new pieces of fancy equipment we're itching to use, and we never stopped doing our research on the latest trends and wicked awesome looks for wedding videos out in the world today. Long story short: we're friggin' excited to get out there again and make some fantasies come true.

That Film Look

Ohhh I swoon. I love the look of film and yesterday I came across these gorgeous Lightroom presets from Totally Rad (like the photo above) to help get me started on crafting that romantic look of film in my own personal digital photography. Although Love and Anchor doesn't photograph weddings anymore, the quality and quirks of these film looks are inspiring and definitely something we'd love to replicate in our videography. We're constantly honing in on what it is we love about what we do. What is it aesthetically that we're trying to capture. Without a doubt, that 'film look' is it. At $99 I think it's a steal! Happy early birthday to me? My birthday is in September... heh.. heh... "Ohhhhh Mattttt!"

--Steph

Going Green

source

Moose! Matt loves moose and this is a photo of one that was found in Algonquin Park which is one of the most beautiful places in the whole world, and pretty much in our backyard. So why a photo of a moose? Because we love animals and our environment. As a family and as a business, we are environmentally conscious and try to reduce our impact on the environment wherever we can.

Over the next 8 weeks, we will be participating in a program that helps us set goals to continue to lower our environmental footprint. There are four themes we'll be exploring and each theme will last two weeks. We'll be setting short and long-term goals related to these themes and our coach will help us meet those goals and check in on our progress.

Our biggest goal that exists in a sort of made up fantasy land is to build our own home, environmentally friendly of course, on Matt's parent's land in Omemee. Financially, we're a bit far off, but every day we get a little bit closer to making it happen. As inspiration we have a survey of the land from the '70's above our computer to help us visualize getting there. 



Wanna join us? Follow along and set your own goals! Hurray for being nice to the environment!

--Steph

Ontario Family: Short Documentary

Production Still taken by Steph for Argus

We hope you're enjoying reading about the project on the go during this off season, because here's another one! There's no trailer for this one unfortunately, but we wanted to share it with you anyway. It's a short documentary film Matt's working on called Willowdale. It's about his father, and all the crazy stories he told him over the years, and particularly, how these stories have changed with each telling, to the point where Matt's not even really sure what's true about them anymore. And also, if it even matters or not if they're true. That's kind of how family histories work, right? Who knows what's true, but it makes a good telling anyway.

So for this project, Matt actually submitted a proposal for financing to Bravo the television channel. They have a great program for funding short films, and Matt and his cousin Michael (who is producing the film and has his own comedy show in the works with Nutjobs) are hoping Bravo takes a liking to the idea and gives them some money to make it. It'll be a great project, using actors to reenact some of the stories his dad told, like the one when Matt's dad and uncle got machetes from their dad as a gift once, and proceeded to a neighbour's house where they chopped up a bunch of furniture in the guy's garage. What crazy stories. We find out in March if we received funding. Cross your fingers! Hopefully you'll be seeing that film on the TV screen in the near future!

Our First Wedding Show

Our first wedding show had us standing on ice. Literally. 

our booth space with our neighbours and all of our gear piled on our table

starts off pretty bare!

OUR BOOTH! tada! A little DIY magic and a blanketponcho to keep me warm.

Our winter boots look authentic next to the winter birch bark trees in our background, non? 

Our entire booth was handmade or repurposed objects straight from our home. We spent hours putting together our business cards which literally tied a knot, painting those birch trees and scrubbing our kitchen table of the baby food remnants. The bunting flags hang in our home now and the picture frames were ripped off the walls and repurposed for the show. We contemplated bringing our desktop mac like other vendors had, but were content for our first show with our trusty 7 year old mac book that I'm writing this post on now. Good old lappy! 

We set-up camp in a hockey arena. Yep! That's how we do in Ontario. We felt like we were literally standing on the ice. We were fucking freezing for hours, I'm not gonna lie. It was pretty bad. Especially at 6.5 months with hours of standing. That's ok though! Once the doors opened, we were happy campers. No complaints from us! It was amazing to chat with brides, grooms and their families about what we love to do.

We made a very conscious effort not to be all up in your face, soliciting and pushing pamphlets. Instead, we politely said hi to those who looked interested and started chatting if the moment was right. I think that approach suits us, although maybe it's not forward enough. We're still working on selling ourselves. I guess you have to do that if you own your own company, eh? 

We received many compliments on our tie-the-knot business cards and received some great feedback on our brand which is equally as important to us as booking. It's very validating to know we're on to something here and the fact that we put so much of ourselves into our work and into our booth, feels good when others get it. 

Now that we've got a show under our belt, I think there's a lot we would do differently and a lot we would do exactly the same. We're already thinking of other shows in our radius we could hit up that would have larger number of attendees (this show had less than 1000 for sure, which was hard for us as a small business owner who rented the booth space expecting more). 

Overall, we were just happy to be there and showcase our work. We put a lot into our handmade booth and even though it didn't quite fit in the booth space, and it was very DIY, and although no one took us up on our show special of booking that day and receiving $500 off, a lot of people entered our contest and a lot of people started to think about wedding video. We're new in town and although we're ready for the business and we'd love to go after it fast and hard, we know that sometimes these things take time. 

We will draw the winner on Sunday. I'm very excited for the future. We made some great connections with local photographers and others in the industry and we can't wait to see how the rest of the year pans out.