[alwa]

To echo your point—the “from the dawn of existence, up to this moment” framing seems to me a fairly familiar way for amateurs to reach for gravitas, in wedding speeches in particular, and especially between partners both of a certain social milieu…

I wonder how much creativity matters for this type of work.

I’m reminded of iPhoto’s little chintzy auto-generated reminiscence movies. Nobody confuses those “Ken Burns Effect” auto-slideshows with, well, Ken Burns’ work—much less art or creativity—but I still find myself moved to see my memories all hookered up in that format sometimes.

[overgard]

I think for something like this, creativity is actually a detriment. You're not going to win an award for an extra-special video, you don't really want to draw attention away from the couple towards your clever editing you know?

[vidarh]

I think this is the case more often than people want to admit. A lot of genres demand the expected and often demand even the cliche and you better have damn good reasons for straying from it. Usually it takes a lot more skill than most people have to successfully deviate from genre expectations in a way that doesn't make things worse.

If you're making a wedding video, you better stick to the genre expectations unless you're the next Scorcese.