Story Of Your Day

Story Of Your Day's own FAQ page answers a question most wedding photography sites never ask themselves: what did the person behind the camera do before this. Emma Wilson's answer is specific enough to check. "Before launching my business," she writes, "I spent over 20 years working as a BBC journalist and pioneering video journalist under the name Emma Massey." That is not a stage name invented for the wedding trade. It is the byline she carried through 20 years in BBC newsrooms, before she traded it for the name the wedding business runs under now. The same FAQ dates the switch closely enough to cross-check: she filmed her first wedding, for a friend, "almost 15 years ago" while still on the BBC payroll, which lines up with the footer line running across every page of the site, trading "since 2011."

That biography sits behind a strict personal-ownership claim, repeated almost word for word on the home page, the weddings page and the FAQ: "When you book Story Of Your Day, you book Emma Wilson. I direct, film and edit every project personally." Asked directly whether she will actually be the one filming, the FAQ doesn't soften it: "No exceptions." For larger or multi-day celebrations she brings a team to help cover the ground, but the direction, filming and edit stay hers.

That claim only covers the video. Ask the same site whether it also shoots stills and the answer changes shape: "We work with a trusted team of photographers who shoot exclusively for Story Of Your Day," booking both, it says, for "consistency, a unified style, and better value." Wilson's own About page names one of that team by role: Suzanne, an "Associate Photographer" with over 20 years' experience, "happiest photographing elopements in the mountains." The other 4 names on the same page, Matt, Nicole, Ronan and Jack, are all filed as videographers or a content creator, none as a photographer. So a couple booking both crafts through Story Of Your Day is booking Wilson for the film and, on the evidence of the team page, most likely Suzanne for the stills, not the same person doing both.

The photographer credit line running along the bottom of most pages tells a related but separate story: a rotating cast of names credited for stills from real weddings Wilson filmed, different on nearly every page (Fabien Deletraz, Cecilia Hofer Photography and Rossini Photography on one page, Stuart Wood Photography and Joel Sorrato on another). One name on the pricing page, Olja Dietiker, already has her own Zurich listing in this same directory. The overlap doesn't say whether she's part of the "trusted team" the FAQ describes or a couple's own photographer working the same day; the site doesn't say either, so this listing states the overlap and leaves it there.

There's no package menu to browse. "Instead of 'packages', I offer three types of [...] commission, loosely based on elopements, intimate weddings and more lavish celebrations," plus bespoke pricing above that, and the FAQ gives a real floor rather than staying silent about money altogether, unusual for this category: "Our wedding film commissions begin at 10,000 CHF for full-day coverage." Every quote "always includes both myself and an assistant," priced by the deliverables rather than the clock, and Wilson caps her own volume: "around 12 to 15 weddings per year, with a handful of intimate elopements and local proposal shoots in between."

A 500GB hard drive buys you the footage she didn't use

Story Of Your Day is unusually candid about what happens to the material that never makes the final cut. "At every wedding we capture between eight and 12 hours of media across all our cameras," which Wilson herself "scours for the best footage to include in your story." What doesn't make it in isn't deleted by default; it can be bought. Send a 500GB external hard drive, or let the studio source one, pay a post-production cost the site doesn't put a figure on, and the raw clips come with it, including candid moments of guests that never earned a place in the edit. 2 conditions come attached: the footage "cannot be edited by a third party," and anyone else using it needs both the couple's permission and, implicitly, the studio's. A couple who wants everything visible on their own online gallery rather than paying for the raw drive has a cheaper middle option, a "FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) edit," built for exactly that. One more line is easy to miss and worth knowing before you order the drive: the site's remastered, cleaned-up audio is built for the edited films only. Raw footage audio is raw.

Canon only, no gimbals, and audio treated as half the story

Wilson describes her own gear plainly rather than leaving it to a stock features list. "As a Canon-recognised filmmaker and Canon Educator, I use Canon cameras and lenses exclusively." Sound gets equal billing: personal mics and recorders on vows and speeches, Zoom H4n units pulling clean audio straight from the DJ or venue system, because, in her words, "audio is half the story." Drones fly where the venue allows them. What's pointedly absent is as telling as what's there: "we don't use gimbals or create high-production-style visual effects on the day." No stabiliser rig, no slow-motion sweep, no perfume-ad polish, by design rather than by budget. Coverage itself isn't timed either: "We offer full-day coverage because you can't tell a meaningful story by watching the clock," which is the FAQ's way of saying there's no hourly rate to negotiate down. She sums up the resulting style as being "a wedding videojournalist in a category of one," a claim that at least has a specific career behind it rather than a stock adjective.

The Swiss Concierge line, and being British on the page as well as the passport

For a tenant built around couples marrying somewhere they don't live, 2 lines on this site do real, checkable work. The first: "In Switzerland, we offer direct support through our Swiss Concierge service, including location advice and trusted vendor recommendations," a named add-on rather than a vague promise to help. The second, stated twice on the FAQ page in almost the same words: "I'm British and a native English speaker, which often reassures my international and US-based clients particularly those planning luxury destination weddings in Europe." Wilson goes further than most suppliers in this category by saying outright that every booking she takes on is a destination wedding, hers included: "Absolutely, all my weddings are destination weddings," with couples flying in from wherever they live to somewhere she isn't based either, often the Swiss Alps, Lake Como, the south of France or the UK.

Her working geography backs that up with named addresses rather than a country list. The site's own featured films and client testimonials put her at Fairmont Montreux Palace twice, at the Blue Lounge and Cervo Resort in Zermatt, at Villa Emden on the Isola di Brissago, at the Grand Hotel Lenkerhof in Lenk, at Schloss Oberhofen, at The Alpina Gstaad, at Grandhotel Giessbach, and at The Falken in her own home village of Wengen. She works "regularly" across Switzerland, Italy, France, Austria and the UK, and has been further afield too, in Bahrain and Dubai, Melbourne, Malibu, Majorca, Romania and Ios. For a couple weighing a smaller day over a big one, she names a real ceiling: "we have filmed and photographed intimate weddings, up to 40 guests, across the world."

What the nav's own Switzerland link actually shows

Every page carries a top-level "Switzerland" link in the main navigation, sitting next to Weddings, Elopements and Films. It doesn't lead to a Switzerland landing page or portfolio. It opens a first-person diary post from 2017, titled "Day in the life of a Swiss destination wedding videographer," and the wedding it walks through, hour by hour, happened in Dijon, France: a hotel hair-and-makeup call, a Catholic cathedral ceremony, a reception at a chateau a 45-minute drive away. Its opening line explains the mismatch honestly enough: "As an international destination wedding videographer in Switzerland, almost every wedding I film consists of crossing borders." It's a genuinely useful read on how she actually works solo on the road, arriving a day early to recce a venue before the couple arrives, but it's an odd choice for the one link a couple would click looking specifically for Swiss work, and it's 9 years old sitting next to blog posts dated into this year. Worth knowing, too: nothing on the FAQ page, the weddings page or the raw-footage page states how long an edited film takes to deliver. The site is candid about pricing and about what a raw-footage buyout costs in equipment and permission; turnaround time isn't published anywhere this listing could find.

None of that undercuts the central claim, which the site backs with more than marketing language. Brittany and Ryan flew from Texas to marry in a small church in the Sertig Valley near Davos, the same church, the site says, where her grandparents had married in 1946 after meeting during the Second World War; their own testimonial confirms the outline and adds that the resulting film got shared at their reception back in Dallas. That's the kind of layered, generational story a 20-year newsroom career is actually built to find and structure, not just to advertise. Between a named starting price, a stated volume cap, a genuinely rare level of honesty about what raw footage costs and comes with, and a founder whose broadcast credentials predate the wedding industry pivot by a specific, checkable name change, this is one of the more thoroughly documented listings a couple in this category will find. The gaps that remain, an undated turnaround and a stale nav link, are the kind worth a direct question on the discovery call rather than reasons to look elsewhere.