INTRODUCING: Abbey Family Documentaries – A Modern Spin on Home Movies

I am BEYOND excited to OFFICIALLY announce the GRAND OPENING of Abbey Family Documentaries!!

(Okay, technically I opened my doors last week, but that was right smack in the middle of “February Favorites” and I couldn’t interrupt that!)

I am so excited to announce my brand new business: Abbey Family Documentaries – a modern spin on home movies.

If you’re anything like me, you are obsessed with capturing your family in photos and videos. If someone is doing something entertaining (silly, stupid, funny, you name it) – you reach for your phone, swipe across to open your camera, and you record what’s going on! Don’t we all?

I’m a photographer, so I’ve been taking photos of my kids since the day they were born.
I have a plan for my photographs: I create big fat family albums every single year & I pack it to the max with all of my precious photos.

I’m a not really a “professional” videographer, but over the last few years, I’ve learned a thing or two about taking videos (thanks to my cinematographer husband). Especially as my children have become vocal and mobile, I’ve found myself taking more and more videos of my family.
There was a problem though: I did not have a plan for my videos. Sure, I backed them up and kept them organized on hard drives, but that was it! I never went back to look at them and even if I wanted to, the thought of sifting through hours of footage to find a single moment was completely overwhelming.

Enter – the 2020 amusement park season.

I had this crazy idea: could I create “vlogs” from our trips to ride roller coasters, while still enjoying my time riding rides & being in an amusement park, while still taking photos for Derrick, and still keeping an eye on my children?
I decided I would try it one evening when we went to Kennywood just to see how it would go.

Well, newsflash, it went amazing. I absolutely loved it and knew that I had discovered something incredible.

For the remainder of the 2020 amusement park season, I vlogged every single trip we took (and published those videos to my YouTube channel). I loved having the ability to go back & remember our trips through my videos – and Braelynn & Leander did too! They LOVED sitting down and watching the videos I made! They’d laugh and point and talk on and on about the trips we had taken – the videos keeping fresh so many precious memories.

As we entered 2021, I realized there was still a “hole” in my video “plan”. I had our trips and vacations covered – but what about our daily life? Especially after becoming so hooked on taking videos on our trips, I was taking even more videos of our regular, day-to-day life too – after all, that’s when the magic truly happens, right? But I still did not have a strategic plan for those “daily life” videos.

Enter: The Abbey Archives.
I decided I would take all of the videos of our normal, daily-life and compile them into a monthly film. These films would be completely random – there would be no story-line to pull them together except for the fact that they were just our normal days.

Between those two types of videos I was now curating for our family, I fell absolutely head-over-heels in love with home movies.

And I began to wonder: could I apply this same process to other people’s home movies? Could I take another family’s home movies, curate them, edit them, and put them all together into a finished film? One that families would sit down to watch over and over again. A product that would become heirlooms within a family – like scrapbooks and hand-written recipe books and hand-sewn quilts? Could I do that?

So, last summer, I gave it a go!
I presented the idea to a few families and had them send me their vacation videos (I decided since that was where I started with my own family, that that would be where I started with other families).
And it was a SMASHING success.

I learned so much during that process and will forever be SO thankful to those families who not only strategically took videos during their family vacations, but entrusted those videos to me.
I became absolutely OBSESSED.
It was the ultimate souvenir.
And I could not get enough.

And so, here we are! I’m officially opening a business to do that for YOU.
I want to take your home movies – your daily-life videos, your clips of special events, and your vacation movies – and I want to curate those pieces into a finished film.
I want to comb through all of your footage and find the BEST moments (we’ll leave all the other stuff on the cutting room floor).
I want to add transitions and music to make your videos feel like an actual movie.
And I want to put it back in your hands so that it is accessible for you and your family to enjoy over and over.

Because life moves ridiculously fast.
Your kids’ tiny little voices will change overnight. Their wobbling walk will turn into a confident run. They’ll lose teeth. They’ll learn how to ride a bike. And it all happens in the blink of an eye.

Let’s save those moments.

I invite you to come follow along on my Instagram account (that’s where I’ll be posting tips and tricks, I show off my own home movies, and I share ideas to get your own creativity bubbling!) and then join my email newsletter where I’ll be sharing discount codes, tips, and more inspiration!