01
The film
The story
Discovery, interviews, archival research and a cinematic biography. It answers who this person was and why their life mattered.
DME Strategy
The living archive
Most of a life story never makes it into the film.
A documentary biography collects fifty to a hundred hours of interviews, photographs and records. About an hour reaches the screen. The rest sits on hard drives, undated and unsearchable, until nobody left knows what is on them.
Life Story is where the rest lives.
The problem underneath
The files are safe. The meaning is not.
Every family already has an archive. It is just scattered: a drawer of old drives, phones nobody wipes, a cloud account whose password died with somebody, thousands of fragments that are undated, untagged and connected to nothing.
Storage solved the wrong half of the problem. The bytes are backed up on three continents. What is gone is the context, and context is the only part anybody actually wanted.
A photograph of a small brick house, in a folder called 2015 uploads, is a house.
Nothing in that file says it is the house he mortgaged three times to keep the business alive.
Why the usual answers do not do this
Single dimensional answers to a multidimensional problem.
A life is lineage and narrative and media and time, all at once. It needs somewhere that holds all four and keeps them pointed at each other.
The deliverable
Film. Book. Living archive.
02
The book
The artifact
A physical companion: photographs, letters, timelines, quotations, and the stories that did not make the film.
DME Strategy
03
The archive
Everything else
The other ninety-nine hours, indexed and searchable, held for the people who are not born yet.
This system
Before the camera
In buildThe archive starts first, not last.
A normal production treats archiving as something to worry about afterwards, if at all. This one is the other way round. Before a frame is shot, the family gets a private link to the Personal Ecosystem Profile: their own drop point for photographs, records, letters and whatever else the shoebox holds.
Live today
No account, no software
A link, and it works. Asking an eighty year old to create a login before they can hand over their photographs is where this fails, so the link itself is the credential and it writes into one archive only.
Live today
Anything, any size
Cassette transfers, deeds, camera masters, files nobody can name. Refusing a file is how an archive loses the one odd thing that turns out to matter, so nothing is refused.
In build
Guided discovery
The questionnaire that runs alongside the uploading and captures what a file means while the person who knows is still in the room. The structure is built; DME is authoring the questions.
What happens to one file
Six things, and four of them run today.
What it changes
Live todayType a phrase. Land on the second it was said.
Every interview is transcribed with speaker labels and a timecode on every sentence. The words printed on a scanned deed are read off it the same way. Searching does not return a file to go and look through; it returns the moment.
One box, not tabs. Somebody hunting for the restaurant does not know whether it was said in an interview, typed in a note, printed on a deed or is the name of a place. Making them choose a category first assumes they know where it was written down, which is exactly what they are searching to find out.
Illustration, not a real record. No scrubbing through raw footage. No remembering which drive it is on.
The taxonomy
In buildSeven Rings of Influence
Not a filing philosophy written for a pitch. It is the structure a life is organized by here, radiating out from who somebody was at their core to the era they lived through. An artifact tags against as many rings as it belongs to and still lives in the graph, so this is a way of seeing rather than a folder tree.
Seven questions, asked of everything
A scan of a handwritten recipe card is a photograph of paper until somebody asks who wrote it, what it was for, and when. Answer those, and it stops being a JPEG: it links to the grandfather, to the restaurant he opened with it, to the heritage it came from and to the decade it was written in.
WhoWhatWhereWhenWhyHowHow much
In build
Where this stands
The rings, the people, the places, the themes and the connections between them are all in the database and the search already looks through them. What does not exist yet is the screen where a producer makes a person, draws a connection, or merges two spellings of the same grandfather into one. That screen is the current build.
How two trades ended up agreeing
The creative structure is the database structure.
The obvious risk in putting a documentary director and a database engineer on the same project is that the narrative dies in a spreadsheet. It did not, because the two vocabularies turned out to describe the same object.
Not only families
In buildA company forgets faster than a family does.
An organization spends thirty years building judgment that lives in the heads of a dozen people, and loses it to retirements and restructures without ever noticing the withdrawal. Founder interviews, product milestones, why a decision was really made: none of it is in the manual.
It is the same engine. Nothing in the structure is family shaped, so the subject can just as easily be a firm. What does not exist yet is a version of this addressed to one: the packaging, not the machinery.
Ten years after he retires
A maintenance problem opens on a bridge finished in 1998. Nobody left knows why it used a non standard material.
Search the archive for the bridge, and the engineer who chose it explains the supply problem behind it, on camera, in his own words.
Whose archive it looks like
PlannedTheir name over the door, one engine behind it.
Live today
Separate from the first day
Every record in the system belongs to exactly one archive, and has since the first migration, when there was only one. Nothing crosses between families, and no retrofit is waiting to be paid for later.
Planned
Their address, their colors
A family signs in at their own domain and sees a system that looks built for them, because in every way that matters to them it was. One maintained engine underneath, rather than a hundred bespoke websites nobody can afford to keep alive.
The honest question
What happens to this archive if we are not here in thirty years?
Not a hostile question. A central one, because a family is not buying software for this year. They are buying something meant to outlive everyone who built it. Technology turns over every ten or fifteen years, so the promise cannot be that this particular system survives. It is that the archive does not depend on it.
Live today
Your own bucket, your own keys
The archive's files live in storage that holds this archive and nothing else, so the handover is an account transfer rather than an extraction project.
In build
An ordinary, documented database
No proprietary container and no encrypted black box. The structure is plain Postgres, and any competent developer in 2056 can read the schema and rebuild the system without us. Packaging that as a document you are handed at signup is still to come.
Planned
One click, everything out
A full export of original masters, transcripts, written work and the relationships between them, in open formats, onto whatever medium exists then. Designed for, not yet built.
Planned
The domain and the credentials are yours
Ownership of the address and every login, handed over on a runbook rather than held. This is a contract term and it is not settled yet.
The medium will change. The structure survives, and the family remains the permanent owner and custodian of the legacy. Always.
Where the build is
Everything on this page, and whether it runs.
This is a working prototype, not a finished platform, and the difference is worth being plain about. Seven things run in production today. The rest is named here rather than implied, so nothing on this page has to be taken on trust.
Built as a DataDay Studio prototype, at the introductory price of $89 against a list price of $500. That is deliberately less than the cost of finding out whether this is the right shape, which is the only question a first engagement should have to answer.
Where this goes
PlannedEventually you will not search it. You will ask it.
Nothing in this section is built, and it is here because it explains why the tedious part matters. A model trained on the open internet gives you the average of everybody. A model given decades of one family’s own transcripts, records and stated beliefs, already cross referenced by person, place and year, is a different instrument entirely.
A great granddaughter facing a hard decision could put it to the archive and get an answer grounded in what her great grandfather actually said, in the year he said it, with the recording to prove he said it. That is only possible if the structure is laid down now, by people willing to do the unglamorous work of tagging a recipe card.
Stated as a direction, not a feature. There is no date on it.
From “we made your movie” to “we stewarded your family’s history”.
A film is delivered once and the contract closes. An archive is added to for as long as the family continues, which makes it a relationship rather than a transaction.