Lives less ordinary

Personal milestones often trigger bouts of reflection, but for two women they sparked an interest that led to new businesses.

When her daughter turned 18, thoughts of her child leaving for university set Odila Braga rummaging through a shoebox of old photos and mementos. The Brazilian expatriate assembled them into an album as a going-away present. She enjoyed the work so much it grew into a home-based enterprise.

Like American homemaking maven Martha Stewart, she went into the scrapbooking business. Braga ran classes, hosted 'scrapathons' and organised yearly retreats for enthusiasts. She also sold supplies such as craft paper, ribbons and trinkets that clients would use to decorate scrapbooks, recording holidays, pregnancies and years spent in Hong Kong.

Recently, Braga and Tess Lyons, her partner in their start-up Mile-stone Memories, have branched into producing picture albums from digital photographs.

In an age when everyone has a camera and no one has time, demand for their service is high, the partners say. 'Hong Kong has an accelerated pace of life,' Lyons says. 'People would rather spend time with those they love than use that time putting pictures of them in a book. People would rather go out and have great life experiences than document them.'

Their clientele come mostly from the foreign community, which Braga attributes partly to the perks of expatriate life in Hong Kong. 'Western ladies usually don't have maids in their home countries,' she says. 'Here it's absolutely wonderful. Hong Kong is very small, everything is easy and often the family budget is bigger.'

People tend to travel more - and bring home more holiday snaps, she says. 'You go to Bali, Vietnam, Cambodia. You click 100, 200, 300 photos just on a weekend in Macau.'

Besides saving time, having an objective pair of eyes look over your photographs can make for a better book, she says. Prices start from HK$2,000 for a two-sided, 10-page book made from digital photos and HK$2,500 for a 10-page scrapbook.

Scrapbook subjects vary, but some themes are universal. 'Obviously, babies are a big part of our market,' says Lyons. 'There's also saying goodbye to Hong Kong, graduations and first communions.'

Just as Braga's scrapbook for her daughter evolved into a business, Australian Gabriela Domicelj of Life Films began with a documentary that she made of her father after he was diagnosed with cancer. 'My children were small and I knew that he was going to die without them knowing him and that saddened me,' she says. 'So it was his legacy.'

Domicelj wrote the script and had a colleague with television experience do the filming. It was completed before her father died and screened on his 70th birthday with friends. Following his death a few months later, the family held a memorial with 200 guests who were each given a copy of the film.

'People were stunned and loved it,' Domicelj says. 'They were saying 'I wish I'd done this for my parents' or 'This is what I should be doing; I have elderly relatives and I don't know their stories.' The idea of a business came from that film.'

Life Films was set up as a unit of Media Village, a local production house specialising in corporate videos. Domicelj, with a background in management consulting, was made managing director.

To test the business model, Domicelj and her team produced another documentary on a subject closer to her heart: her maternal grandparents, John Phillips, a former chairman of the Reserve Bank of Australia, and his wife, Mary. A high-profile Australian couple, they ended their lives together after they turned 70 although both were in good health and good spirits. They had planned to die when they felt they'd led a fulfilling life, Domicelj says. 'It's a love story and it fit into our mission to make movies that move and inspire.'

Her grandparents may have led extraordinary lives, but Domicelj says ordinary people can make compelling subjects.

Preparation is the key to making a good film, says Life Films director Charles Edwards. 'The planning and development stages are the most critical in terms of understanding clearly what it is we're going after and then structuring the film around that objective,' he says.

'More time goes into develop-ment than production [of a film].'

Even though ordinary people can make extraordinary narratives, it can be challenge drawing the material out of them, Edwards says.

'We're not dealing with actors. People have different levels of comfort in front of a camera. It's my job to make them feel in a safe enough place, where they can open up and talk freely.

'We can capture stuff that they wouldn't, or wouldn't have been able to articulate in quite the same way. We make it in such a way that it's enjoyable for them and their friends, and is ultimately entertaining.'

Professional videos don't come cheap: a three to five-minute clip costs HK$60,000 and half-hour films HK$200,000.

For Korean-American banker Harold Kim, it's been a worthwhile investment. There's 'a qualitative difference between what you can do casually on a home set-up and what a professional production company can do', he says.

He and his wife had a half-hour video made of life with their five sons earlier this year and are delighted with the results. 'We're not from Hong Kong and expect to move back to the US sometime, so we wanted to make sure that when our kids are older they'll remember life in Hong Kong,' Kim says. They thought it would be interesting to have something retrospective about the family.

Their first video has set Kim and his wife thinking of more projects, including further snapshots of the family's life in Hong Kong and documentaries of their extended families. 'My wife's parents and mine have lived quite interesting lives. We'd like to document that, for them and for posterity.'

But assigning the job to professionals doesn't mean families don't need to put in any effort. 'Getting pictures together, scheduling a day and a half shoot, preparing for the interview; there's stuff to get done,' Kim says. 'It was work, but it was a lot of fun.'