For Wedding + Mitzvah Montage Clients
The Montage Photo Guide
The simple way to choose, organize, and send the photos that become your film. Follow this before you upload anything and you will save time: and get your montage back sooner.
Start here: what you're actually building
Classic uses up to 125 photos across 5 sections and runs 5 to 7 minutes. Premium expands the story to as many as 200 photos across 8 sections and runs 7 to 10 minutes. More photos only help when the story has room for them, which is why each tier has a clear cap.
Classic and Premium section formulas
These are starting points, not rules. Shift the counts within your chosen tier while keeping the Classic total near 125 or the Premium total near 200.
Bar/Bat Mitzvah
Classic · 5 sections
Growing Up 25 · Family 25 · Hobbies & Activities 25 · Friends 35 · Finale 15 (= 125)
Premium · 8 sections
Growing Up 25 · Siblings 20 · Family 25 · Extended Family 20 · Hobbies & Activities 30 · Friends 45 · Milestones 20 · Finale 15 (= 200)
Wedding
Classic · 5 sections
Childhood: both of you 25 · Families 25 · Friends 25 · The two of you 40 · Finale 10 (= 125)
Premium · 8 sections
One partner's childhood 20 · The other partner's childhood 20 · Families 25 · Friends 30 · How you met 25 · The two of you 45 · The proposal 20 · Finale 15 (= 200)
How to choose within a section
- One photo per moment. If you have eight shots from the same birthday, pick the one where the faces read best.
- Faces big in the frame. A wide beach shot with two specks in it disappears on a screen across a ballroom.
- Include the people who will be in the room. The best moments in any montage are when someone sees themselves.
- Spread the years. Five photos from age four and nothing from age nine leaves a gap the room notices.
- Skip near-duplicates. Two nearly identical frames back to back read as a stutter.
Sending photos so they actually look good
The file you send is the file we have to work with. A good original gives the film room to look crisp on a large screen.
- Send originals. Do not text them to us and do not screenshot them: texting compresses a photo to a fraction of its resolution, and it will look soft on a big screen.
- Use a Google Drive folder, Dropbox link, or shared album.
- Old, low-resolution photos are fine: they read as vintage and they belong in the story. What does not work is a good photo that has been through several rounds of compression.
- Vertical phone photos are fine.
- Physical prints: let us scan them for a scanning fee. Do not photograph a print with your phone.
How to organize the folder
A clean folder saves us sorting time, which means your montage can get back to you sooner.
- One folder per section, numbered so they sort in story order: 01_Growing_Up, 02_Family, and so on.
- Inside a folder, we sequence chronologically unless filenames tell us otherwise: number the filenames if a specific order matters.
- Add a "Must Include" folder for the handful that absolutely have to make the cut.
Music
Music gives each section its shape. Send your picks at the same time as your photos so the edit can be built around them from the beginning.
- One song per section: five songs on Classic, up to eight on Premium.
- If it is playing at the party, pick clean or radio edits.
- Avoid tracks with an abrupt tempo change in the middle: they fight the cuts.
- Send song picks along with the photos, not after. Swapping a song once the first draft exists means re-timing every cut in that section, which is why it carries a song-swap fee and why we ask for song picks up front.
The deadline
- Everything is due 4 weeks before the event date.
- Production takes 3 weeks from the day the last photo arrives: not from the day you booked.
- Materials that arrive after the 4-week deadline carry a rush fee, and inside 2 weeks of the event we cannot guarantee the montage is ready.