Notes on filming Laguna Beach
Laguna is not one long beach. It is a string of small coves, each held between points of rock, with the town and the resorts up on the bluffs above them. That shape settles most of a wedding day before anyone plans it. Up top there is open water and a long horizon. Down below there is only as much sand as the tide leaves you.
The light splits the same way. On the bluff, anyone facing the ocean in the last hour has the sun behind them, so a frame is either about their faces or about the silhouette, and that choice gets made before the camera rolls. On the sand the evening light runs along the shoreline rather than straight in. This coast faces southwest, and the sun goes down to the right of the water in every month of the year, by a smaller margin here than it does up at Newport.
Sunset in Laguna moves from about a quarter to five in early December to just after eight at the end of June. More than three hours of difference in where a ceremony can sit. It is the first number we ask a couple for.
Getting married on the city's sand
A ceremony on a public beach or in a park here needs a permit from the city, and the permit is short. Two hours, and those two hours have to hold the decorating, the vows, the photographs and the cleanup. The city also asks beach couples to schedule for low tide, which is the most useful line anywhere in its paperwork.
The season decides where you can stand. From Labor Day weekend to Memorial Day weekend, most of the city's parks and beaches can be permitted. Through the summer, beach weddings move to four beaches below the Heisler Park bluffs: North Main, Rockpile, Picnic and Divers Cove. Three places are off the list in every season, Treasure Island Beach and its park, Goff Cove and Christmas Cove. Treasure Island is the beach below Montage, so at Montage the vows stay on the resort's lawns.
The limits are specific. Fifty people at Crescent Bay Park, the Heisler Park gazebo and Monument Point, ninety-five at the city's other beaches and parks, and the count includes the officiant and the photographer. No chairs, no tables, no arch or structure of any kind. The spot cannot be roped off, the public keeps its right of way through it, and no parking is set aside for your guests. This spring the permit itself ran from $460 to $570 depending on the site.
Cameras on public ground
The city licenses the cameras separately from the ceremony. Filming or professional photography anywhere on city property, which means the beaches, the parks, the streets and the sidewalks, needs a city film permit. Resorts, private homes and state or county land sit outside that permit and run by their own rules.
Summer tightens it. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day the city does not issue its commercial permit, the one written for video, at all, and even its still photography permit is limited to half past seven to ten in the morning or six until sunset. For a summer wedding film, that moves the portraits off the city's sand and onto the resort's lawns or other private ground. The rest of the year it is an application filed at least three weeks ahead, which is our paperwork and never lands on the couple.
Drones, and where they cannot go
Laguna has had its own drone ordinance since the summer of 2017. Over Heisler Park, Main Beach Park, Treasure Island Park, Crescent Bay Park, the Irvine Bowl and every city beach, only a pilot holding an FAA remote pilot certificate may fly. The water is the exception, and the ordinance allows flight out over the ocean. A drone flown for business, which is what a wedding film is, also needs a city permit.
Just up the coast, Crystal Cove State Park allows no drones at all. So an aerial of the coves is planned on paper, around whose ground the drone takes off from and what it flies over, weeks before anyone is standing on the bluff waiting for the light.
The venues we know
Montage Laguna Beach. Our films there: Nic & Sophie and Jan & Brian. The lawns sit on the bluff above Treasure Island Beach, and a ramp off the park trail is the way down to it. The resort's 2022 policy sheet closes its outdoor spaces at ten and points every outdoor speaker out to sea, so the band's position and the last hour on the lawn are both decided by that sheet. Confirm both against your own contract. The Montage page has the rest: each lawn by size and capacity, the walk to the water, and the tide level at which the rocks open up.
Timing a Laguna Beach wedding
Take sunset on your date and count backwards. A ceremony that ends about ninety minutes before it keeps the family photographs and a real portrait window in good light, and it is the same rule we use on the Montage lawns. Then check the tide. The rock shelf below the resort only opens up once the tide falls to about two and a half feet, and when that low water falls near sunset it is worth rearranging the evening to be there for it.
In summer, plan the portraits for the resort's own ground rather than the public beach below it, for the permit reasons above. The other summer problem is getting guests into town during festival season on Laguna Canyon Road, and our Orange County notes cover what that means for a July or August date.
How booking works
The Moment is $6,000, The Portrait is $8,000 and The Legacy is $10,000. The Portrait and The Legacy add a second cinematographer, the full ceremony, every speech and drone footage, and all three include a custom wedding website. The collections page sets the three side by side. For the wider market, what a wedding film costs in Orange County has the numbers tier by tier, and when your ceremony should start goes further into the sunset math.
If your Laguna date is set, check it with us. Down the coast, Dana Point has a page of its own.