This video premiered at Extra Special People’s annual gala, Big Hearts, at the Classic Center in Athens, Georgia. It was shown as part of a night of speakers and content that culminated in a room full of passionate people raising over $150,000 to benefit Java Joy, a non-profit that employs adults with special needs and brings all kinds of smiles to its clients.
Making this video was one of the great pleasures I’ve had as a creative. One of my great passions when making certain videos is to create something that builds emotional depth such that it truly cuts through to the audience and pulls at their heart strings. So, how do I gauge this when I’m staring at a screen, at the same footage, for hours on end of editing with only myself as the audience? The metric I’ve developed is this: once I put something together that makes me well up as I’m editing it, I know I’m getting somewhere. I’m happy to say that this video was able to do that to a room full of people - it truly made an impact.
In my opinion, working as a creative with a non-profit is a difficult but worthwhile task. It asks much more of me than to just make a pretty video - it requires that I immerse myself in the cause, the story, and the potential impact of telling that story well. Put simply, if I am telling the story, I need to know and care about it. This is the story of Kaeti, Nick, and their daughter Wynnie, the cutest kid you’ve ever seen with the most radiant smile.
Throughout the process, there was much for me to learn, and many questions to answer. After sitting down with the family, as well as the team at Extra Special People, I learned that Wynnie nearly didn’t make it. Before her birth, doctors discovered three large cystic hygromas which would threaten her life and, if she were to beat the odds and survive, she would have Down syndrome. For days, Nick and Kaeti’s heads spun, and they wondered what they would do if their daughter wasn’t born, and who to turn to for support if she was. Shortly after receiving that news, an encounter with a Java Joy Joyrista, an adult with Down syndrome, gave Kaeti and Nick new hope for what their daughter’s life could be like.
Three sessions of filming were planned, all of which you can see in the final product below. First, we filmed Kaeti and Nick interacting with their daughter at home to capture the love that they have for Wynnie on a day to day basis. In that same session, I interviewed them in their home about their story of fear, and then hope for Wynnie (my questions even sparked tears from Kaeti, which you can see at the end of the video!). Then, I filmed them walking through the facilities at Extra Special People to capture the hope that ESP provides the family for Wynnie’s future, as this will be a place that Wynnie can receive an abundance of support throughout her childhood. Also during this session, you can see Wynnie interacting with other children of different abilities as well as ESP staff at a program for young children called ESPlay. Finally, we headed to a Java Joy pop-up event to film Wynnie interacting with Joyristas. This serves the purposes of providing a visual aid to Kaeti’s story of meeting the Joyristas for the first time, as well as capturing the hope of Wynnie becoming a thriving Joyrista one day.
I hope you enjoy. Thank you to Kaeti, Nick and Wynnie for letting me tell your story!