2017 Reel
💍🗓 4 weeks late at posting a 2017 reel, but there's so much that happened over the past 12 months that I couldn't just post without meaning [continue reading to find out why].
From moving out in April, to getting a full time job at McMaster University, trying to keep up the business side of wedding filmmaking along with refining the film craft, realizing how much my schedule has changed and not seeing the people I used to see often, and similarly seeing new faces that I'm seeing continually. But one of the biggest lessons I've learned professionally has to do with why I seemingly stopped being active.
I learned to expect that the worst can happen, to prepare for it, but to trust that everything that's meant to be will be. As a professional who relies on saved images and videos to keep moving, one of the worst possible things happened in September that stopped this whole thing: My hard drive with multiple weddings crashed before I could save it to backup drives.
That never happened to me before, and it literally put me on hold and in a rut with my worth and what I could create. My first mistake was giving it to a hard drive recovery center without researching their rate of recovery and waiting 3 months for them to tell me they couldn't do anything. I was playing the waiting game for that long, and it just kept snowballing downwards. I was giving refunds and apologies to everyone affected once that news hit me. I never felt so defeated, so down and doubtful about trying to do this wedding filmmaking thing. But I couldn't just drop it. With so many family memories on the line, I needed to exhaust every single option.
I asked other places around the area and the GTA with little confidence, but then I found a reliable-looking recovery center overseas and eventually sent it out. And, to this day, I felt the utmost relief when they told me it was 100% recoverable and I'd have it back in 3 weeks. Since then, I've been furiously editing all the footage together and getting these films out as soon as possible.
2017 had so many ups and downs, and made me question whether this is something I can actually handle. But it also taught me to trust that the good things that are meant to happen will happen. Just keep going. ♥️
