When we tell people about what we do, they’ve usually never heard of it before.
They ask: How did we get started in this line of work? How did we find it?
You could say it found us.
In the mid-2000s we were living and working in Los Angeles. Marina was editing independently produced documentary films and Stephen was writing and directing his own short films.
The father of a friend approached us to create a film. Because his father had recently passed away, the only record that remained of his father’s stories was a video interview with his parents. He wanted our help editing the interview to make it more watchable. He also had a collection of family photographs to add to the video.
The video interview was shot by family members at a Thanksgiving gathering. It was not technically perfect – the camera wasn’t level and there was lots of extraneous background noise. But the stories were wonderful: how this couple had met and married during World War II, of how the husband had witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later survived the sinking of a battleship. There were travels, adventures, the births of children, told by a couple of charming, funny, affectionate people who had actually lived the stories.
Our favorite parts of the interview were the unexpected details. Like the father’s calm description of swimming away from his sinking ship and treading water in the southern Pacific Ocean:
“I was happy. We figured that probably the only way we were going to live through this situation was to get sunk and survive the sinking. That had happened, and I wasn’t badly injured so I just got up on my back and swam along, happy as a clam.”
We enlivened the interview with photographs from our client’s family archives: the father in military uniform, the couple’s wedding pictures, the battleship before it sank. To color the mood of the stories, we incorporated music from our client’s own collection; songs from the era which were his parents’ favorites.
As we worked on streamlining and illustrating the story, an idea took root in our heads. This one-time project could become a long-term business. We can do this for other people.
More than 5 years later, we’re still helping people tell their stories.
