The way we begin our day usually determines how the rest of our day will go. If we start off the day by waking up, going straight to work, & barely speaking to each other, then let’s face it, we’re probably going to have a crappy day. So to avoid this, we always start off our day by making cappuccinos together in the kitchen while Eva begs at the door to go outside because she knows the routine: once we start making our cappuccinos, it means it’s almost time for her to go outside so she can play.

After teasing Eva with a game of shutting & opening the door real fast, we then drink our cappuccinos together on the back porch while she runs around the back yard. Then when it’s time to start working, we’re completely relaxed & we feel good knowing that we have spent some time together that morning.

You don’t specifically have to drink coffee with your spouse or maybe you’re not even married, but we would encourage you to spend your first hour of the day doing something that relaxes you or whatever best gets you ready for your work day.

We’ve had the privilege of shooting some suuuhweeeet weddings over time! We’ve also made some of the best friends from shooting weddings. One of the most interesting things we come across is when we first contact our couples and they start telling us stories of other filmmakers they have met with and some of the crazy stuff they tell them in order to try to get the job! So today’s post is a fun video kinda poking fun at wedding filmmakers:) We also had to post an example of one of our videos so you know we’re not one of those crazy companies who actually do the weird transitions:) hahaha! Enjoy!

We recently shot a few fun on-the-spot interviews for a workshop that our good friends Zach & Jody put on here in Nashville, TN. During the shoot we got to interview some really cool cats who attended the workshop! Heather & I are pretty addicted to an app called Instagram for iphones. Basically, it makes normal people like us look like freakin amazing photographers, using only our iphones and a few filters!

Since we didn’t get a chance to Instagram during our shoot the other night, I came home, grabbed a frame from video, and put it up on Instagram! Once I posted it up on Instagram, Heather & I were lookin at it and I said “Hey…wouldn’t it be cool if we could color our footage that easy?” Then I started thinkin How hard would it be to grade some footage to look like one of the Instagram filters.

I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t always do things the proper technical way you should. With that said, here are a few shots of the progress we made on some footage we’re workin on.

Below is a quick vid showing the difference between the orignal and graded shots! BAM:)

Now like I said earlier, we don’t always do things the way the books say to do it. We just figure out the look we want, and then have at it until we get what we want. There are a trillion ways to get to the final graded footage that we got, but here are screen shots of the color grading progressions during our grading fun.

…Oh wait…ready for the kicker…We did this in FCPX…gasssp:) Each screen shot you see is a different color correction. There were 10 total, and then a nice signature Instagram vignette at the end:)

I think we got pretty close!! There’s still a lil difference between the two, but we wouldn’t want to make it look exactly like Instagram would we? (Okay, yeah we would, but I got tired and went to bed)