Legacy Video

Hi everyone! Mark here.

I had a funny experience last week, and I wonder how many of you can relate. Katrina and I were in the mountains, where the turning of the season was a little more obvious than it’s been in Durham of late, and I suddenly realized how close we are to the end of the year. Which of course made me think back over the year to the various projects we’ve worked on at Fifty Two Hundred Photo + Film.

One of my favorite projects this year (so far) was a Legacy Film that we put together for the Teer Family. We’ve mentioned these Legacy Films to you all before: They’re an opportunity to film someone as they look back on their life and revisit stories that might otherwise be lost. Katrina and I draw from our training in helping professions to build rapport with the family in question and coax these stories to the surface.

In the case of Cookie Teer, her son wanted to capture some of her incredible life stories, but he was unsure how comfortable his mother would be on camera, so he approached us with the idea of filming his mother having a conversation with one of her oldest friends over a cup of tea. I thought this was a brilliant idea, and fortunately it went so well that we eventually filmed two other days’ worth of material, including visits to the original family home and a family plot at a local cemetery. We were all really happy with how it turned out, so I thought we might share a quick little one minute clip with you all. The story still makes me chuckle. Hopefully you’ll see the humor in it, too.