Lee. Meaningful work. Work we were designed to do.

a family sits on a couch, watching an end-of-life video created for them by the Grandmother, where she tells a story about growing up on a farm. There is a sunset and the farm and fields.
So much talk of disrupting, AI coming for our jobs, scaling, selling, growing...
 
After so many years in the race, I find myself in a place that I wish I had found much sooner. One that calls out the inner artist. One that has me being truer to myself than I can ever recall being in a profession. My current business has me creating videos for companies, independent film-makers and personal clients. It's that last one that I'm thinking about today as I've just wrapped another project.
 
Those videos that fall into the "personal" category of video editing jobs often involve editing footage from weddings, skiers, professors, those capturing someone's life in a memorial service, spouses giving an anniversary gifts, foundations putting on charity fundraisers...there's a whole range of requests that come in. I put them into this category of "personal" largely because they don't fall into "company video" or "film-maker project" categories. 
 
I first heard from Lee back in the spring of last year. Lee had COPD from smoking for decades and was in declining health. A palliative care nurse was at her home often. She and her husband had recently taken a trip to the ocean on the east coast to do a final renewal of their vows together. And the outcome was that the palm trees were whipping around because the wind was so strong. 
 
Someone had recorded the ceremony with an iphone but the wind had cut out most of their words and only left those of the officiate. Lee had already gone to a video editor that she had found on Fiverr or Upwork (some freelancer platform online) and the video editor only made it worse, applying so many audio effects that it sounded somewhat...in-human. I told her that I would listen to it and if I thought that I couldn't improve it, I would pass on it, tell her upfront and not charge her for my time. 
 
After reviewing the footage, it became clear to me that no amount of voice isolation was going to fix this recording. The wind had simply kept the voices from ever making it to the microphone. So, I got back on a call with her and gave her the news. But, as we got to talking about it...it occurred to me that, we really could have her and her husband re-record their written vows again in a windless, indoor location and then I could match the new audio up with the former video. She was delighted and somehow got her husband to read through it one more time (sorry Robert!). This took some doing to get it right...but I attribute my misfortune of not having the greatest hearing to saving the day. Back in about 6th grade, in order to avoid hearing aids, I started reading lips. In most situations I'm ok, but over the years, I seem to have gotten better at lip-reading. A few hours later, after much zooming in and working on placing the audio frame by frame over the right moments from the original video, we had something that she was pretty excited about. Once we got the music laid in, a final montage of photos from the day, and some titles, she was just beside herself with joy over what had been created.
 
Fast forward to a couple months later and Lee felt that it was time to go beyond this one video captured for her and her husband and asked me to make an end of life message for the entire family. It was a bit of a process on her end of finding the photos that accurately portrayed her life's most memorable moments, and she had to work on this in secret, telling her husband that she was doing some scrap-booking. We found an app that would help her take decent photos of the pictures, crop them and add them to an album that I could access. Then I would group the photos together as best I could, into a rough draft timeline, upload them to a secure viewing area on Frame.io so that she could see the video's progress. And when she needed to communicate where to move photos to, she could simply pause the video, comment alongside Frame would add timecodes onto the video for me to know exactly what she was referring to in her comment. 
 
She was fun to work with, and always telling me in her own humble way how technologically challenged she felt. Or how much of a bother it must be for me to work on this for her. She'd say, 
 
"Now those 2 from the 25th anniversary  can go in the ending montage, IF it’s not too much trouble.
 
Feeling like “Trouble Should Be My Middle Name” (that’s a song, isn’t it)?"
 
Or when realizing that she had one more photo to add, she'd say, 
 
"My palliative nurse practitioner just left, I’m not dying yet!  Let me see if I can’t pitch Emily through the magic portal now."
 
...the Magic Portal being what we came to call my file transfer portal, from MASV.io it allows me to receive hundreds of GB's if need be of video footage for projects...it streamlines the upload, doesn't choke out the bandwidth on either end, still beats overnighting something and blows away options like dropbox, etc....No question this is overkill in a situation like this, but if it makes her life easier, I'm happy to oblige. Because I had decked the interface page out with various fun screenshots from photo and video projects, and beacuase of it's capabilities, she started calling it my "magic portal". The name kinda stuck. 🪄
 
After a few iterations of this, we had something that she was elated with, just absolutely soaring over.
 
She kept submitting Google reviews to express her happiness with the whole thing, aaaannnnd Google kept rejecting them...I suspect her repeated attempts were starting to make her look like a review-spam-farm.
 
"We are better than good. This is just perfect, John, and again, I can’t thank you enough!  I hate to think of all the extra time you’ve put into it, but I do so appreciate it.
 
I can’t find anything at all that needs fixing.  I just hate to let this go!  I’ll be back to frame to watch it from now until I can’t anymore…I hope that’s quite a while.
 
And I bet that stinking Google won’t let me review this either!!! Of course, that might let the cat out of the bag, and it’s going to kind of hard for an urn of ashes to write a review.  Don’t want to get too morbid yet! 😉
 
💕 -Lee."
 
Fast forward to last week - and now it's been 7-8 months since we wrapped that video. Thankfully, her health has improved, she's taken a trip with family, and well...she's probably watched the video more than a few times. So...she reached back out and felt that we should re-record her portion one more time, feeling that she could say some things that she meant to say, and say others better than she did the first time. I gave her a few quick tips that might make the recording sessions easier and away we went. This version, even better than the last.
 
Here's the thing. Why take on a project like this when so many editors aggressively insist on charging their full day rate of $950-$1,200 to even spend an hour on a project? I hear it all the time on the forums, "If I show up, or open a project, they get charged my full day rate..."
 
What do I personally get out of a video project like this one?
 
Clearly this isn't a high-paying proposition.
 
But don't let that fool you into thinking that I don't get anything out of it. Helping someone put together their final message to those they have loved for a lifetime, is....a bit hard to describe. I completely get that there are video editors out there who would take on a project, charge an arm and a leg for it, assume the elderly are sitting on a gold mine of retirement cash and then just slap it together as quick as possible assuming there would be no critique of the final product. 
 
But - shouldn't someone in my position give it their all? 
 
Wouldn't that be the right thing to do? 
 
This is, after all, the last thing they will ever say to their spouse, their kids, their grandchildrenEver. 
 
It could potentially have more meaning to her family than her last will and testament. 
 
It could potentially be watched over and over again through the years. 
 
It might even be passed on to, yet unborn generations, as a more accurate picture of family geneology than one would normally receive through the visual family tree and some antiqued photos on the wall.
 
It is my pleasure to work on projects like these. It is my privilege. I pour myself into these, until often I am the one in tears as I get to the final cut. It IS meaningful work. It IS the work I was designed to do.
 
I told Lee, that I am happy to work with her on another version of it, decades from now, when she wants to update it with all of the new memories that she has created with the family. Until then...