So, here is my very first blog entry and it only seemed appropriate that I make it about my journey into filmmaking and the importance of family films to me. Click 'play' above to listen, or take a few moments to read along with me.
One of my favourite things to do, as an adult, is sit down and watch one of the two or three home videos we have from when we were young. I love looking at my Mum and Dad in love and how their personal style has changed. I love making comparisons to how different their lives looked at 30 to how mine does.
There's nothing quite like seeing the faces and hearing the voices of those people in our lives who are no longer with us, and just having a moment to reflect on how beautiful, important and sublime they were to us in childhood and beyond.
I love looking at my sisters and feeling an immense sense of pride for who they are and who they have blossomed into. It's an experience which I think is genuinely unique.
I find it comforting, rewarding, incredibly emotional and deeply important in connecting with who I am now and learning about the type of person and mother I aspire to be. I knew then, that I wanted to create a library of resources for my own daughter, and my future self to pass on the opportunity to have this experience, and this sense of somehow cheating time, memory or my transience in this world.
I remember reading Joseph White's poem 'Time is a Thief' and being stunned at well one, how bleak it is, but mainly actually how true those words are and how important it is to so many of us to create some of sense of legacy and record of significant moments in our lives, however insignificant they may seem to the spinning world.
I started writing letters to Edie when I was around 19 weeks pregnant, and now at 3 , she has perhaps 50/60 letters from me. Some of them are longer, more profound and reflective about how different stages of motherhood has impacted me. Others are more for pure documentation purposes- the cost of the weekly shop today, perhaps.
They're always honest, they are always loving and they're an invaluable gift I can give to her one day.
I also took thousands of videos and photos of my time being pregnant and in the first year of her life, I genuinely took about 2000 images and clips of her. It honestly became a little overwhelming. I'd see other Mums doing the same and often sharing these clips in video diaries as perhaps a blog or an instagram post/story. What occurred to me though was firstly, that I had no idea what I was going to do with this material in the long term. 500 video clips are great but they didn't really tell a cohesive story or realistically give that sense of life right now in the way that my childhood 10 minute home videos did. And with phones being so disposable in today's world and technology moving so quickly, I feared that all of this would perhaps be lost as data on a memory stick somewhere or a CD that would perhaps get scratched or damaged.
I also noticed that, of the 2000+ images and videos, I was perhaps in 10 of them and this was also true of the Mums I'd seen share these clips and pictures, too.
If I hadn't written the letters to Edie, my whole emotional journey as a new mother wouldn't have been documented in any way, really. And for me, that felt like a bit of a tragedy because it represented such a fundamental shift in my world and in me.
I needed to have some sense of what I looked like and sounded like. The Mum voice I adopted or the funny little songs I made up. The greys making an appearance and the clothes being more comfortable.
It was really, at this point, that I sort of made a commitment to myself to be more present with Edie in my day to life with her, and make what I document of our time authentic and purposeful. I started making little videos where I spoke to her about what she was doing and how she made me feel. Rhys and I recorded some audio for her at 6 months and I asked him some questions about how he felt about being a Dad, and how his life had changed. This was a really fun experience and I'd whole heartedly recommend it. I knew though, that video was the end goal.
I moved on to then making little films of our adventures together, and to try and make sure I was in the picture or that my experience was being noted and documented, just as much as Edie's or Rhys'.
I did a course on filming, invested in mentoring, bought a new camera and watched a ton of videos on Youtube about shutter speed, aperture, light and audio. I called upon photographer and videographer friends to ask questions about creative choices and ideas. I really was and am, so committed to trying to hone all of the creative energy, joy and passion into producing an heirloom or time capsule for the families and clients I work with. It's not something that's easy to do or widely available, either.
Creating family films then, was more than just an opportunity to start a business, it really was a chance for me to offer women and families the experience to just be themselves and have something purposeful, meaningful and emotional to treasure. I find it truly joyful to capture the magic and human connection that's innately and fundamentally intertwined within the sense of family.
This certainly doesn't always have to be biological and it means many different things to people but truly, the sense of 'family' is majestic. My aim, therefore, is to capture that and how it manifests itself in the everyday. The little moments we so often take for granted. That is why I film and what my aim of each film is. To showcase that to clients and give them a sense of euphoria and pride in purely watching themselves just being, is a privilege and the reason why I do what I do.
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