Every film I deliver is shorter than the one I first assembled. Not because the footage is bad — because most of it is footage of a wedding rather than footage of these two people.
The drone shot goes first. It establishes a venue nobody watching needs established: they were there. Slow-motion confetti goes next, then the second and third versions of the same speech reaction, then any shot where I can feel myself having found a nice angle.
What survives is unglamorous. Hands. The gap before someone answers. A parent who thinks nobody is looking. Those are the cuts people write to me about a year later, and they never mention the crane move.