Sentiment - Video and photo montage production

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.

» Continue reading

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.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/wiltshire/hi/tv_and_radio/

turn up, tune in!

Just arrived back home from BBC – wow getting up at 5am this morning was hard work… but worth it!!

The interview was mainly based around funeral photography, and I didn’t get a chance to even mention the idea of filming funerals or talk about any of the other amazing products and services we offer –  looking back they introduced me as ‘Louise Harris Owner of Funeral photography firm’ which isn’texactly right but that was their spin on the story! However I really enjoyed talking about somthing I am passionate about – and thats giving people a choice when it comes to planning a funeral.

It was great to meet Annie Styles from Cruse Bereavement Care too and I have to admit… quite liked being on telly ;o)

Tune into BBC breakfast TV tomorrow morning at 7.40am - I’m being interviewed by Charlie Stayt and Louise Minchin about funeral photography and filming funerals  7.40am

 http://www.lifebeforedeath.com/

I really want to enjoy the concept of this new interactive website that is here to change the way we think about death, BUT my life is busy and my attention span to websites is very limited when I have to wait for all this stuff to load . All the  beautiful flash animations and graphics  in the world  don’t win me over if I can’t access the information I’m looking for in the short few minuets I have to spare…

Its ashame – because the bit of information I did managed to acess from the About Us page  drew me in.  I like the tone, I like what they are saying, I like the concept…”  here’s an extract from their About Us page:

It’s no big secret that Death has a bad rep. It is after all the End-of-Life. Boo-hoo.

But now, Death is being re-branded with a new image and attitude.

All this to try and change your mind about this whole Death & Dying thing.

We’re not, of course, suggesting you hasten the process along in any way – let’s be clear about that.

Instead we’re talking about making every bit of your Life Before Death more meaningful to you and the people you hang around with.

Whatever way you choose to journey the years, months, weeks or days before the End, we’re here to open up a world of possibilities for you.

Carpe Diem. Grab the bull by the horns. Live Life. Get the picture?

So do me a favour – check this site out, let me know what you think… Let them know what you think

Charles at The Good Funerl Guide sent me a link to a company that actually put your ashes in a vinyl record! For 2k And Vinyly will compress your ashes into 30 discs so your loved one can ‘play you’ when you’re gone ;o)

www.andvinyly.com

far out!

On a personal note, I took my baby girls to Reading Festival last Friday, highlight was  watching Mumford and Sons. As I watched them Arabella was sleeping in her buggy and Connie my 4 year old was waving her arms in the air with a big smile on her face, I  had a tear roll down my eyes as they played this song – After the Storm , Mumford and Sons . I dont know why, but  It remninded me of a client I had recenly who lost his young wife. It also made me look at my girls and just gush with ‘ooh wow, life is just so bloody precious’

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