Sentiment - Video and photo montage production

NFE 2011 was an incredible year for Sentiment. Having exhibited  in 2009  we found that funeral directors thought  the Sentiment product range was too modern –  however this year things were very very very different…

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I just heard that John Barry died, it made me cry. I don’t normally get upset by famous people dying , I deal with the real people in life and death and that’s emotional enough. I didn’t cry because of his loss I cried because of his amazing influence on me and my gratitude for his life.

 I think Out Of Africa was one of the first videos I remember seeing. I was probably about 7 years old. It was not something I would have chosen to watch, I was more interested in the Care Bears but my mom was a working single parent and the only time we’d actually have time to sit with her and chill out and have a  cuddle was on the sofa with a video.

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How many of you have analysed your life, thought about where you came from and where you are going, how you will be remembered and how you want to be remembered?

For some of us its hard to think about our existence, hard to think about life without our friends and family or think about our family living life without us. For others thinking about the end highlights how wonderful this life really is, and brings gratitude that we we are still here on our journey… and that’s what is important.

Sentiment believes that we should remember that we are living in the here and now… because we know all too well that life can short. Be aware that all your achievements and stories along the way have made you who YOU are and we should celebrate that and commemorate.

 In a time when we like to preserve our history, why not preserve a little bit of your own history … whether you want to create a DVD for your family as a gift, or a life biography to pass onto your children, a Memory book of your life with photos and stories. If you want to ensure that one day your family will know what to do for your funeral and celebrate your life in the way that best reflects you, then please speak us for funeral event planning or commemoration DVD production.

Happy new year, and all the best on your Journey.

This is Sentiment’s 4th Christmas and as ever we are not sending Christmas cards (We can hear your eyes rolling :O). Yes it’s a bit of a cop out, but we are donating to ‘The Child Bereavement Charity’ instead, a wonderful charity that we are very passionate about. At the same time we’re saving trees and saving the postman from any more added stress over this white Christmas! 2010 has been a super year for Sentiment, we’ve worked with some great people and great Funeral Directors, Filmed some beautiful Funerals, made some very touching Tribute Films and created many many Photo Slideshows that have stirred laughter and tears at a funeral / memorial service, as well as other events and celebrations of life. We even had some super press coverage but nothing that could top our national TV appearance on BBC Breakfast TV where we talked about Photographing Funerals.

A nice ending to the year has been moving into our shiny office in Old Beaconsfield town.

Please can you update your records or new details are :
19 London End
Beaconsfield Bucks
HP9 2HN
0845 409 6124

HOW CAN WE WORK TOGETHER TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN 2011?
We truly believe that Sentiment is not just a business, but a bit of positivity helping people celebrate life. We are hoping for the same positivity in 2011 by collaborating with more businesses and charities so we can really make a difference. If you have any projects, ideas or charity fund raising for 2011 and you would like some help or our involvment then do let us know.

We are also open to promoting your business on our Blog. If you have any special offers or you are opening the way to innovative new ideas then do let us know and we’ll do our best to announce it on the world wide web.

So here’s wishing you all a wonderful Christmas and fantastic New Year 2011.

The Rosetta Stone

So forget heading off to the cemetery to pop some flowers on your loved ones grave sitting there and reminiscing in your own head -  what about pulling out your phone and checking out their old facbook pages, twitter updates blogs etc on the virtual grave – its all possible with a bit of bluetooth technology

it’s the kinda tombstone with Bluetooth and solar panels and stores your logs; friends and family can come over and access your virtual life from it and keep each other updated with anecdotes about you by uploading their stories to the tombstone. !!!

E-TOMB…

Yes I know, this is going to make lot of people go ‘ooooh what a horrid idea’ but i have to admit – I love it, being an avid facebooker , blogger and twitterer I love the idea becase so much of our lives are impressed upon the internet.

What do you think??

When my mom’s old friend died a few months back it seemed that in those weeks surrounding her death Facebook continuously suggested that I become friends with her – I found it eerie that it had never happened before and now that she was dead she was there almost every day on Facebook smiling away at me suggesing I become her friend!

In truth I liked it, it reminded me of her and reminded me of what her kids were going through, reminded me to drop them an email and see how they were getting on, (and also to call my own mom to tell her I loved her). However in time she sort of faded away from Facebook. 

Having read the New York Times article (from the Connecting Directors  blog)  today that addresses this issue, I decided to see what had happened to her account . It is in fact, still live. I wondered if her family knew what to do with it and this got me thinking what I’d want my family to do with my own account.  Personally, I’d like my account to be left up, then my friends and family can still message me and look at all my old photos and shenanigans – Maybe they’ll be wireless in heaven so I can plug in and have a read – Id like to think so

So what do you do when a family member dies? Maybe you just want to leave things as they are in the land of social network… but  did you know that you can memorialize a Facebook profile:

Here’s how – We’ve taken the information direct from Facebook

Please report this information here so that we can memorialize this person’s account. Memorializing the account removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only. Please note that in order to protect the privacy of the deceased user, we cannot provide login information for the account to anyone. We do honour requests from close family members to close the account completely.

 Removing the account:
Immediate family members may request the removal of a loved one’s account. This will completely remove the account from Facebook so that no one can view it. We will not restore the account or provide information on its content unless required by law. If you are requesting a removal and are not an immediate family member of the deceased, your request will not be processed, but the account will be memorialized. 

What would you like to happen with your own Facebook account? Does anyone have your login details so they could access it if needs be and how comfortable would to feel if you saw your recently deceased best friend pop up to reconnect with you? or do you feel that facebook is for the living and online memorials best left to websites such as MuchLoved

The New York Times article below addresses the issues.

As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out

Courtney Purvin got a shock when she visited Facebook last month. The site was suggesting that she get back in touch with an old family friend who played piano at her wedding four years ago.

The friend had died in April.

“It kind of freaked me out a bit,” she said. “It was like he was coming back from the dead.”

Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, knows a lot about its roughly 500 million members. Its software is quick to offer helpful nudges about things like imminent birthdays and friends you have not contacted in a while. But the company has had trouble automating the task of figuring out when one of its users has died.

That can lead to some disturbing or just plain weird moments for Facebook users as the site keeps on shuffling a dead friend through its social algorithms.

Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle the ghosts in its machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution.

“It’s a very sensitive topic,” said Meredith Chin, a company spokeswoman, “and, of course, seeing deceased friends pop up can be painful.” Given the site’s size, “and people passing away every day, we’re never going to be perfect at catching it,” she added.

James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University, said the company was experiencing “a coming-of-age problem.”

“So many of Facebook’s early users were young, and death was rare and unduly tragic,” Mr. Katz said.

Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group, with 6.5 million signing up in May alone, three times as many as in May 2009, according to the research firm comScore. People over 65, of course, also have the country’s highest mortality rate, so the problem is only going to get worse.

Tamu Townsend, a 37-year-old technical writer in Montreal, said she regularly received prompts to connect with acquaintances and friends who had died.

“Sometimes it’s quite comforting when their faces show up,” Ms. Townsend said. “But at some point it doesn’t become comforting to see that. The service is telling you to reconnect with someone you can’t. If it’s someone that has passed away recently enough, it smarts.”

Ms. Purvin, a 36-year-old teacher living in Plano, Tex., said that after she got over the initial jolt of seeing her friend’s face, she was happy for the reminder.

“It made me start talking about him and thinking about him, so that was good,” she said. “But it was definitely a little creepy.”

Facebook’s approach to the deaths of its users has evolved over time. Early on it would immediately erase the profile of anyone it learned had died.

Ms. Chin says Facebook now recognizes the importance of finding an appropriate way to preserve those pages as a place where the mourning process can be shared online.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, members begged the company to allow them to commemorate the victims. Now member profiles can be “memorialized,” or converted into tribute pages that are stripped of some personal information and no longer appear in search results. Grieving friends can still post messages on those pages.

Of course, the company still needs to determine whether a user is, in fact, dead. But with a ratio of roughly 350,000 members to every Facebook employee, the company must find ways to let its members and its computers do much of that work.

For a site the size of Facebook, automation is “key to social media success,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.”

“The way to make this work in cases where machines can’t make decisions is to tap into the members,” he said, pointing to Facebook’s buttons that allow users to flag material they find inappropriate. “One way to automate the ‘Is he dead’ problem is to have a place where people can report it.”

That’s just what Facebook does. To memorialize a profile, a family member or friend must fill out a form on the site and provide proof of the death, like a link to an obituary or news article, which a staff member at Facebook will then review.

But this option is not well publicized, so many profiles of dead members never are converted to tribute pages. Those people continue to appear on other members’ pages as friend suggestions, or in features like the “reconnect” box, which has been spooking the living since it was introduced last October.

Ms. Chin said Facebook was considering using software that would scan for repeated postings of phrases like “Rest in peace” or “I miss you” on a person’s page and then dispatch a human to investigate that account.

“We are testing ways to implement software to address this,” she said. “But we can’t get it wrong. We have to do it correctly.”

The scanning approach could invite pranks — as the notification form already has. A friend of Simon Thulbourn, a software engineer living in Germany, found an obituary that mentioned someone with a similar name and submitted it to Facebook last October as evidence that Mr. Thulbourn was dead. He was soon locked out of his own page.

“When I first ‘died,’ I went looking around Facebook’s help pages, but alas, they don’t seem to have a ‘I’m not really dead, could I have my account back please?’ section, so I opted for filling in every form on their Web site,” Mr. Thulbourn said by e-mail.

When that didn’t work, Mr. Thulbourn created a Web page and posted about it on Twitter until news of the mix-up began to spread on technology blogs and the company took notice. He received an apology from Facebook and got his account back.

The memorializing process has other quirks. Memorial profiles cannot add new friends, so if parents joined the site after a child died, they would not have permission to see all the messages and photos shared by the child’s friends.

These are issues that Facebook no doubt wishes it could avoid entirely. But death, of course, is unavoidable, and so Facebook must find a way to integrate it into the social experience online.

“They don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but yet they are the keeper of those living memories,” Mr. Katz, the Rutgers professor, said. “That’s a real downer for a company that wants to be known for social connections and good news.”

Source: NYTimes.com

So I’m back down to earth and getting into the groove of juggling business, baby, family and everything else that we call ‘life!

Sentiment was busy while I was away, with funerals being filmed and memorial photo sideshows  being edited to a superb standard. Also the Sentiment-Productions division was busy with show reels, wedding edits, birthday gifts and memory books.  So I would like this opportunity to say thank you my team for holding the fort while I was away and thank you to those clients and well wishers for the cards, flowers and gifts.

So I’m back down to earth and in true tradition have a Spotify Play List to go with my ramblings!

With all thats being going on I think about how Lucky I am, some of you maybe aware that we actually thought we had  lost Arabella when she was born, had it not been for something guiding us to being checked out by a midwife a few hours before I went into labour  both myself and Arabella may well have died.

Awareness of death gives us a greater appreciation of living today and empathy for those who are suffering and struggling with their own grief and loss.

If you only really have trivial problems in life – smile and pivot those negative feelings and see the wonderful gift of life – for its it very very short and ever so precious.

here is my own personal ‘Celebration of Life play list‘ I listen to it a lot, it keeps me grateful.’

On Monday I went to a seminar by Dr Bill Webster from Greif Journeys, it was held in the Chiltern Woodland Burial Park and sponsored by Arnolds Funeral Service  and Golden Charter

 I love Chiltern Woodland Burial Park, I love the energy, the feel, the design of the buildings, and the fact it is so welcoming and beautiful so  you can just turn up  for a nice walk in the woodland.

 As I sat listening to Bill explaining that if we start to really understand someone’s loss then we can begin to understand their grief, I watched  2 squirrels chasing each other up and down the trees,  the birds flying round outside and the sunshine through the trees – sound corny? yes maybe I do, but it was  beautiful and what I feel the woodland is about- death, life, nature, peace, comfort

 I feel that the woodland brings a certain element of peace to suffering souls - loved ones will never come back  and that’s by far the one thing we want most ,  but somehow being so close to nature sends a a blanket of comfort and peace… or maybe that’s just me being sentimental! 

 Dr Bill Webster is a captivating speaker, he had a great analogy of loss being like a lined up of dominions – you lose your husband and bit by bit there is domino effect where you lose so many more elements of life, from having a cup of tea in bed every morning to your independence, lifestyles, home and even possessions. When you understand the elements of someones loss and underand that life will never ever be the same for that person again then you understand that  there is no time scale for their grief to subside, and we cannot expect people to start to ‘ just get on with life’ after 6 months…

 After Bills talk there was a horse drawn cart waiting outside with 2 stunning white horses to take  everyone round the woodland – I opted out of this due to the fact I may give birth any second and didn’t think a horse and carriage would be a great idea – and if I’m honest I’d see the spread of cakes that was laid out in the  that the gathering hall and rushed in to taste what was possibly the best Victoria sponge i have had!  - I proceeded to eat like only a heavily pregnant can get away with!