We have some exciting news to share– our fabulous couple Sarah & Euri– who had a destination wedding in Fiji last year are being featured on the new show, Our Wedding Story on UPTV THIS Friday, July 13th! We caught up with The Blue Kite Boys, who filmed Sarah & Euri’s wedding (and who are the filmmakers of this television show!) to learn more about this episode and their new series. We can’t wait to share this wedding with you (we’re launching it on our new website, which is coming soooooooon!) — so if you want to get some first sneak peeks, be sure to tune in THIS Friday, July 13th to Our Wedding Story up UPTV!

We’ve also shouted out all the fantastic vendors that made this wedding absolutely wondrous at the end of this post! This wedding was truly a collaboration between so many talents.

Sarah is one of the first people we met after we moved out to LA around six years ago. She’s a wedding photographer, and so we met at various wedding events, which led to going to parties and concerts and even Coachella together. As a result, we kind of witnessed the storyarch of Sarah and Euri meeting and then getting engaged. So when they were planning their wedding, it was pretty obvious that we would be the ones to film it (while getting our party on in between filming).

Photography by Allan Zepeda

What was the filming process like?

Well, what was normally a 12-person jumper plane turned into a 5-person one as our gear and luggage battled with the weight restrictions of the tiny little island-hopping plane. It was a fun, sometimes stressful, truly unique process. We’ve never been to such a remote island, or traveled on such a small plane (let alone with eight bags of gear), or experienced such a culturally rich country. In terms of the actual filming, some of the first projects we did as Blue Kite Cinema were adventure films which involved similar activities we captured for Sarah & Euri: hiking, cliffjumping, boating, etc. It was going back to our roots in a way! But we were also there to celebrate our friends, so some days definitely ended with us packing the cameras, having some Kava, and dancing with everyone.

Outside of making sure our jumper plane didn’t fall out of the sky because we were bringing too much equipment, we didn’t have too much of a hand in the wedding planning and set up. There are people much more talented than us to take that charge.

Oh boy. Well, we both actually have music degrees! Colin in sound engineering and Nick in music business. We got into cinematography when we started filming our own music videos for our rock band, Escape Directors (#checkusonSpotify). Colin was into photography at the time and we sort of “found” the video record button on his camera. We like to think we’ve evolved from the days of stealing a rolling trashcan from the college dining hall, throwing Nick in it with a camera and kicking the can back and forth as a makeshift dolly. After we graduated and the band broke up, we needed to find real-people jobs. Nick answered a Craigslist ad (where else do you find real-people jobs?) to shoot for a wedding cinema company and after filming 40 weddings that year, we moved out to LA and started Blue Kite Cinema with the goal of focusing on adventurous, destination weddings! We’ve constantly challenged ourselves to continually build our craft, which has led to us winning various filmmaking awards and landing some incredible projects, including Our Wedding Story.

Hoping the official government of Canada doesn’t read this — filming a wedding in Banff was one of our favorite and most stressful locations. Mainly because a week before going, we heard multiple horror stories of US filmmakers being detained by Canadian border patrol which installed the fear of Trudeau in us when we crossed. But once we were there, it was simply stunning. The mountains and lakes and sweeping landscapes… it’s just a filmmakers dream. Just don’t tell anyone we were there, eh? We been lucky to have filmed in over 15 countries and each proves to be a unique experience.

Photography by Allan Zepeda

This was our first time in Fiji and hopefully not our last. Sarah and Euri kept saying how they wanted to have their wedding there because they felt it was a great excuse for their family and friends to experience such a wonderful culture that they otherwise wouldn’t. And we agree — Fiji isn’t the easiest country to get it. It’s not typically the first item on people’s travel bucket list. But we’re hoping that after seeing Sarah and Euri’s episode on Our Wedding Story, people will be encouraged to travel and explore all the experiences there.

Being that Sarah and Euri were friends first and clients second, it was a little different. But we typically attract easy-going couples due to the way we market ourselves as the Blue Kite Boys. We like to present a sense of youth and adventure — we encourage our couples to add us on Facebook and are open about the fact that we love tacos and tequila and a great party. Weddings are fun! As a result, for typical clients, we’ll do an initial meetup over coffee or cocktails so we can start learning their story and we can just get to know each other. We did have a similar brunch meetup with Sarah and Euri a few months before the wedding, just to go over ideas and all the activities they had planned for the week. We then put together their Highlight Film (https://vimeo.com/236137988) and premiered it about 8 weeks after we returned from Fiji.

The whole thing has been wild! When we first moved out to LA, we had no desire to be apart of the Film & TV Industry. People think we’re joking when we say this, but we seriously moved out here for the weather. But it’s like LA osmosis where you just become surrounded by the “Industry.” It’s impossible to fight the creative urge to be a part of it. So we kind of naturally fell into various commercial and TV projects over the years, which led to us having an email-once-every-18-months relationship with one of the amazing Producers over at UPtv. He approached us with the idea for the show, we made a pilot, and it got picked up to go straight to a 10-episode series which has become OurWedding Story! One of the first ideas we explored was seeing if we could use any recent clients as some of the episodes, and Sarah & Euri were just an obvious choice.

Ceremony & Reception Location: Koro Sun Resort & Rainforst Spa, Savusavu Fiji // Photography: Allan Zepeda Photography // Videography: Blue Kite Cinema // Wedding Planning & Production: Ali Phillips/Engaging Events by Ali // Event Design: Candice Coppola/Jubilee Events // Rehearsal Dinner Event Design: Aimee Monihan/Tropical Occasions // Floral Design: Events by Nadia // Officiant: Pam Horowitz // Gown: Rue De Seine, Lovely Bride // Hair: Cindy Stirling Makeup & Hair and Via Dolce Salon // Makeup: Forte Makeup Studio & Makeup Therapy // Veil: Viktoria Novak // Shoes: Melissa // Stationary: Two Paper Dolls Design House // Rentals: Nuage Designs, Rosie Holidays Fiji // Music: The Flashdance