Dear Team,

Your safety remains our number one priority, and while I struggle to imagine that you’re eager to read our little newsletter with all our city is facing right now, I did want to send a message with something of a reminder and encouragement:

The work you do matters. I neither say this often enough, nor with any tinge of self-importance. What you do carries weight and has an impact.

Whether it’s Erin coming in over the weekend to help a journalist get their footage to air, our VFX team working on content that provides some comfort to people at home, Ramy running from studio calls to technical in order to help shows find a path back to production, or Thomas, Ty and Erin building infrastructure that will allow us to scale faster and for more support, or Paul holding this place down every night, or Travis, Tim, and David putting themselves in harm’s way with every delivery and wipe-down of this facility, or Sophia meticulously managing our budgets—what you do does matter.<

Voices—individual and collective—matter. There is no change without voice to power. Our stories will always be catalyst to change. Tech can’t do that. Finance can’t do that. Even education alone can’t do that—it’s stories. It’s voices. It’s having an outlet and a platform.

That is what we do here. That is who DigitalFilm Tree represents. That is who we all do this for. Each of you has a voice and an artistry that makes this place what it is and contributes to the dreams being made in this city every day. The dreams and stories that are then shared around the world, that represent more than our individual hopes or aspirations.

To that end, this one tiny little business is also powering other facilities. Where others fell, we were able to offer a hand and say let us help. We see our friends at MelroseMac having been vandalized Saturday night and will support them in any way possible.

This community is so much more than people making a living—it’s a people making a life. Your part in that is never as small as you may think. We are fortunate beyond measure to have withstood so much change inside such a small window of time and I believe that’s in large part to many of you already knowing, in your bones, all that I’ve already shared above.

Did anyone else watch the NASA/SpaceX Falcon 9 launch? I cry every time. Every launch without fail. It’s the tangible achievement of thousands, literally soaring toward the sky. Years of work and countless hours filled with the blood, sweat, and tears of people who all believed that we, as a team, could achieve something so much greater than ourselves, together.

Thank you. Continuously and sincerely, thank you for choosing this team and this work daily.

Please keep the MelroseMac team in your thoughts as they navigate the tremendous damage they suffered over the weekend (photo of their offices attached) and let us know if you need ANYTHING during these curfews and in the days ahead.

with gratitude,
nancy jundi, coo
digitalfilm tree