Practical Wedding Advice from Top San Francisco Wedding Planner: Behind the Scenes for Weddings

Like many of you, I love looking at beautiful things. It's a blessing to be in the wedding industry because a big part of my job is to look at beautiful things, and to make things beautiful. What most people outside of the industry don't realize though, is that behind the beautiful photos on blogs, magazines, and pinterest is a whole lot of sweat and tears from very talented and hard working people striving to bring a vision to reality.

Over the fourth of July weekend, our team worked on a rather complex and large production wedding at the De Young museum in San Francisco. It took over 300 design and planning hours between my team and Gloria Wong Design's team to create the extraordinary blueprint for over 60 staff members to execute on the wedding day.

It's hard to describe to clients the level of detail and precision that an event requires, particularly at museums. Even for an event design that is more simple, a lot of thought has to be put into the production, to be sure it executes correctly. Everything can look perfect on paper, but execution is key, and that is exactly what our team thrives on! We love the challenge of working at non-traditional venues, and helping our clients to create extraordinary events at the most unusual places.

Here, I'd like to share some behind the scenes photo from our recent wedding at the De Young museum....the parts that clients and guests never get to see on the wedding day!

With an open garden like the Sculpture Garden at De Young museum, the exact orientation of the ceremony set up can take some time to work out, and precision is important so we always have our measuring tape with us!

Gloria Wong Design's team measuring to be sure each acrylic tray has the same distance from one another, ensuring that the aisle width is straight and consistent

Loading in at a museum is much more than just removing things from a truck. A detailed production schedule gives each vendor a specific window of time to use the loading dock to load in and it takes a lot of manpower to unload, roll everything up a ramp, and properly staged in the designated area

Unwrapping all the plexi trays also requires a lot of TLC to be sure that fingerprints wouldn't get left on the trays

Getting water into the plexi trays took hours of effort, starting months before where we had to jump through a few hurdles to get approval from the Parks & Rec department. A 100' hose was prepared ahead of time for this mission, and Asiel Design's team took hours to properly remove all the water following the ceremony, to be sure it was disposed correctly. One seemingly simple idea took many hours and manpower to execute!

Chair placement is also no easy task in a space like this, and when the vision is to do a semi-circle ceremony. Here, Ginger is instructing the staff from the rental company on precise placement of each row of chair

Asiel Design's team working hard to get the floral arches just right, while ensuring that there would absolutely no risk of the trees toppling over in the wind.

After about 5 hours of hard work and team effort, the results were absolutely stunning....

Asiel Design's team spent hours glue dotting sprayed leaves onto the custom wall flat panels from Blueprint Studio

Blueprint Studio's team carefully placing each custom, laser cut panels into the wall flats

Ginger working with Julene of Paula Le Duc Fine Catering on placement of the custom charges from Blueprint Studio and the napkin fold for each place setting

All the vendors staged and lined up, waiting for the museum security's green light to roll everything into the museum

Getting the baby grand piano onto the lawn required using wooden planks to ensure that the weight and wheels wouldn't damage the garden's grass

Amanda helping to dog-sit for a few minutes during the wedding party portrait session. Yes, our hospitality team on the wedding day would happily do all kinds of things for our clients! :)