Video company chronicles daily life

NYU alumna Jillian Ezra is turning the trend of taping the small moments in life into a business opportunity. Founded in Los Angeles in 2012, her video company, Ezra Productions, is now available in New York City.

The video service offers personalized videos of families, capturing the day-to-day moments in their lives and memorializing the intimacy of basic interactions.

The production crew begins their work by conducting background research and interviews to pinpoint their client’s unique needs and goals for the personalized video. Next, the Ezra Productions filmmakers spend one or two days recording the clients to capture tiny moments of their daily life and to understand the client’s habits and interactions. Ezra Productions also helps clients edit any footage shot on their own phones.

The crew interviews the family members of the client and records their answers. For example, they would ask a grandparent to say a few words that they would want their children to remember throughout their lives.

“We are not focused on doing a dynamic photo album,” Ezra said. “What we really want is to help them tell a compelling story about their life, their living history and build their family archive.”

This is a new approach to showing a family’s values from generation to generation through the memories of daily life. In one video featured on the company’s website, parents play with their children in the family room of their apartment.

“The ability to record essentially anything and everything has truly transformed our relationship with memories, and those accompanying experiences,” Steinhardt sophomore Shira Feldman said. “It’s a beautiful thing that we can reminiscence so fondly and document the unexpected special moments.

Gallatin sophomore Anya Urcuyo said there are limits to how organic these moments captured on camera can really be, however

“I think when we solely focus on recording our life events, we take away the human connection and interaction we get from those actual experiences,” Urcuyo said.

LS sophomore Michael Abraham pointed out that technology is now being used to commemorate daily life.

“Recording our day-to-day moments is a triumph for anthropology,” Abraham said. “We’ve created a real-time record of the way we think about and represent reality.”

A version of this article appeared in the Thursday ,Oct. 23 print edition. Email Lingyi Hou at [email protected].