A Day in the Life of a Wedding Planner

Before I had decided I wanted to do journalism, I wanted to do lots of things when I grew up. One of them was to become a wedding planner. Like any of my old dreams, they're all things that I still wouldn't mind doing or trying out, but for now becoming a journalist/magazine writer is the type of thing I want.

Anyway, last Saturday I had a great opportunity to see what it's like to help out/work behind the scenes of a wedding because a friend of mine just planned and coordinated her first wedding herself! She interned for a couple years at a wedding planning company and since it was her first time heading out on her own, she asked for some help and wanted to show what weddings are like the day of. If any of us helping out wanted to look into wedding planning, this was that experience that could either scare us away or make us want more of it. This wedding was not what I expected, but I do want to work more weddings to see a wider variety of weddings and styles of weddings. (If you want to see my experience first-hand, watch my video about it!)

Our day started by meeting up at 7:30am to get Starbucks and head over to the venue, the Newland Barn in Huntington Beach. The setting up process was a little slow at first but once the decor came and more friends of the bride and groom showed up to help, we were getting things done! For the first three or so hours, it was also raining so that also delayed us and caused for us to set up the venue for rain even though by the time the ceremony started it was all gone.

It didn't take long for me to realize that the theme of the wedding was Australia! The couple is moving to Sydney soon because the husband won Australia's "Best Job in the World" contest and won the position of Chief Funster. Because they're moving to Australia soon, they wanted to theme the wedding after their future home for the next year!

The bride had worked hard to make and create all of the decorations by hand, which I loved! All of the decor was very hipster and pinterest-y, which I soon found out were very fitting to the couple's personalities. 

It was really awesome to watch these ceiling decorations go up! I helped put up the draping cloths in the background [:

When everything was put together, everything definitely looked straight out of Pinterest. It was all really beautiful put together. If you look at the "table" of desserts, you'll notice that it's actually an old door on top of two trash cans!

Although I didn't get to try it myself, the couples' friends did a slo-mo photobooth for them. You basically get to do something and the camera plays it back in slow motion for you. The most popular thing to do for this was throwing confetti!

In the city of Huntington Beach, apparently only beers and wines are allowed at events, but even despite that, these people were drunk and GONE after drinking so many glasses of beer and wine! You can see the effects in my video blog about the day!

The couple's ceremony was really short and sweet, but it was still very cute. This is, however, the only clear picture I have of the couple. I have a couple clips of them from the reception, but that's about it. The bride was beautiful with her pink and white ball gown dress! I probably wouldn't wear pink with my dress, but I loved the style for the most part; it worked very well for her and the flower crown she wore as well. 

After watching all the fun people dancing drunk, we ended the night with sparklers. I couldn't take any pictures of the dancing; that kind of thing is so much better to watch in a video than in a picture! If you watch my video, skip over to 5:20 to see my montage of all the crazy dancing! (There was one girl who was drunker than everyone at the party and even cut her foot from dancing drunk near some broken glass. Unfortunately I couldn't capture that haha). Surprisingly, mostly everyone was gone by 9:30pm!

Considering the circumstances of the wedding, it was a great experience! I'm excited to get to work at a wedding again, hopefully sometime soon!