All of my wedding photography packages include timeline assistance! But what does that actually look like once you're booked? You'll get a welcome email from me right after I get your contract and retainer payment, and then a week or two after that I typically will send you your timeline questionnaire! One exception to that is if you're doing an engagement session with me too. If so, I typically wait until after I've delivered your engagement photo gallery, and then we'll get started on timelines. Below you can see the rest of what we'll do for planning together!

The Timeline Questionnaire

You won't need to know how everything is going to go when you fill out the questionnaire! It's actually intended to help flesh out the day for you in your mind. It also collects all the important details for me so that I can start to draft your timeline based on your needs and priorities.

Some of the questions on the timeline questionnaire:

• Tell me about how you envision your wedding morning going! (how does it start? what are you most excited about?)
• When do you want to see your partner on wedding day?
• Is your ceremony location indoors or outdoors?
• Have you announced (or privately decided) on a ceremony time?
• What time is sunset on wedding day?
• What time are you guys planning on leaving?

Like I mentioned above, the questions are built to help you begin to envision what you're wanting from the day. They help me understand what's most important to you, what you don't really care about, and where to start building your timeline from!

Creating your first draft

After I get your timeline questionnaire back, I spend quite a bit of time reviewing it and thinking about how you want your day to go. As I start drafting, I usually start with two particular pieces: sunset time and your ceremony. Then I'll work backwards through your pre-ceremony activities, and then finally into reception outlining. Your first draft will be broken up into sections (pre-ceremony, ceremony, post-ceremony, reception) and will look a little like this:

Revisions

I'll send the first draft of your timeline in questionnaire format. At the end of each section is an opportunity for you to reflect and provide some feedback on what you might like to be different for that part of the day! This is a really important part of the timeline planning process, and I've purposefully built it so that it's really easy to suggest changes. I'll remind you of this in the email I send with your first draft: this is not my wedding day, it's yours. And I am NOT emotionally attached to the timeline I'm drafting for you. My goal is to help get your vision written out so that we can make it happen!

The Second Draft

Once you get your revisions and feedback to me, I'll make a second draft of your wedding timeline! This version won't be broken up into sections like the first draft, and will instead be a single page document that you can provide another round of feedback for at the bottom. The first draft is about picturing each section of the day, the second draft is about seeing it all together!

Final Approval

Once you've looked over your second draft, you can make additional notes and resubmit it to me. When it's good to go, we'll leave it alone until one month before wedding day! One month out is when I send out your final wedding questionnaire, and as part of that you'll copy and paste your finalized wedding day timeline into it, so that I know we're on the same page and nothing else has changed. (Or if things have changed, what to expect!) And then it's wedding day!!