Brian Shaffer Talks WeDoVids, FrameCourier, and Subscription Fatigue with Voyage Ohio Magazine

Voyage Ohio Magazine recently featured WeDoVids co-founder Brian Shaffer as part of its Local Stories series, and the resulting conversation covers more ground than most studio profiles do. It traces a friendship back to 1988, a career that ran through IBM and independent film before it ever touched Dayton, and a studio that ended up building its own software out of sheer frustration with everyone else's. We wanted to highlight a few pieces of it here, along with a link to read the full interview.

Two paths that took thirty years to meet

The interview opens with the origin most people at WeDoVids already know but rarely hear told start to finish: Brian and Sarah met in high school in 1988, then spent decades on almost entirely separate professional tracks before those tracks converged. Sarah's path ran through news photography at the Springfield News-Sun and the Dayton Daily News; Brian's ran through IBM, independent programming, and eventually a self-produced documentary that premiered in Eugene, Oregon in 2004. It took until 2018, and eighteen years on the West Coast for Brian, before the two paths actually lined up again and WeDoVids was formed.

What stood out to us reading it is how little of that time was wasted, even though none of it looks planned in hindsight. A news photographer's instinct for working fast under pressure and a programmer's instinct for building systems that hold up under load turn out to be exactly the two skill sets a production-company-that-also-builds-software actually needs.

Built on a trial by fire, tested again by a pandemic

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