Jacob’s Daughter
CLIENT: St. Andrew Legal ClinicPROJECT: St. Andrew Legal Clinic (SALC) is an incredible organization which offers low-cost legal services to Oregon families in crisis. We produced this documentary-style video for SALC to share the story of one of their clients. SALC helped Jacob fight a complicated custody battle to obtain custody of his daughter Caelyn. Without SALC Caelyn would have been stuck in an unsafe, traumatizing environment which had already started to affect her emotionally and academically. In this video we become part of the Weiss family as we hear their story first hand.
APPROACH: Opening up the doors to your home and personal life is hard. Doing so and reliving a difficult past on camera is even harder. All of the decisions we made involving the production of this video revolved around ensuring the family was comfortable using a trauma informed approach. First we wanted to build a rapport with the Weiss family, so we met with them to drink coffee, eat pastries and get to know each other before there were any cameras involved. Knowing the family and their story before production helped inform how we conducted our interview and b-roll shoots. For example, we learned that a big part of Caelyn’s life was her emotional support dog, and that she loved cooking so we knew that some of our footage would highlight these two things. Lastly, we were told it wouldn’t be in Caelyn’s best interest to be interviewed but we still wanted to give her a voice. This is why we decided to capture her audio during our b-roll shoots to supplement the overall story. RESULTS: We’re thrilled to announce that this video broke a fundraising record at SALC’s gala! Take a look at the flattering compliment we received from the Executive Director, Kevin McHargue, “We have never had a response as powerful as the response to that video. Many people commented to me that the focus on the client and his family, without the attorneys, made much more of an impact. I think it is going to be the model for all our future videos. I really cannot thank you enough for the skill and emotional intelligence you brought to this project!” For more information go to salcgroup.org