Bring us the box you've been meaning to deal with.
Most family archives are split in two: boxes of prints and discs in a closet, and thousands of photos and videos scattered across phones and accounts no one has sorted. We bring both together — scanned, converted, clearly labeled, and organized so you can actually find things.
Digitization is where we start, not where we stop. Once your archive is safe and searchable, it becomes something you can use — for a film, for your family, for whoever asks about these people someday.
Anyone can put photographs to music. That isn't the same as telling a story.
A template slideshow shows pictures in order. A life-story film has an author. We watch the footage, listen to the voices, and learn the person before we edit a single frame — then build the film around what actually defined them: the work, the marriage, the jokes they told badly for forty years.
Every film is edited by hand. The music is chosen for what it meant to them, not what a library suggests. The pacing follows the life — some chapters need to breathe, some need to move. Nothing comes off a shelf.
Story-first editing
Structure and chronology built around the person, not the file order.
Personal music
The songs from their kitchen and their car, licensed and placed with care.
Voices included
Interviews we record with you, saved voicemails, toasts, and messages, woven through the film.
Every source, one story
Photographs, film, video, letters, and documents cut together as one narrative.
Made with you
The family — or the subject — reviews and shapes the film with us at every stage.
No templates
Visual treatment, titles, and pacing designed for this life only.
Two ways to tell a life story.
Most life-story films are made after a death, assembled by people who are grieving and guessing. We do that work, and we do it gently. But there's another way — and it starts while you're still here.
Celebration-of-Life Films
When someone dies, the story falls to the people who loved them — usually on a deadline, usually mid-grief. We take that weight on. We help you gather and organize the material, sit with you to learn who they were, and edit a film worthy of showing at a service, a gathering, or quietly at home.
- Ready in time for the service when needed
- We handle collection, scanning, and organizing
- One point of contact, start to finish
Living Legacy Films
This film is made with you, not about you. You choose the photographs and explain what's happening in them. You pick the music. You tell the stories the way you've always told them — including the ones only you know. And if there are things you want your children or grandchildren to hear from you directly, you say them, in your own words.
- Your voice, your selections, your telling
- Recorded conversations, not scripts
- Personal messages for specific people, kept private until you choose
Either path comes at two scales. The Tribute — your pictures and music, carefully sequenced, ready in days. The Signature Film — voices, interviews, and chapters, built over weeks. Both begin with the same free conversation, and a Tribute can always grow into a film.
The people who love you will try to tell your story someday. Don't make them guess at the best parts.
Five steps. We carry the heavy ones.
Gather
Bring us what you have: boxes, albums, discs, drives, phone libraries, and the stories that go with them. It doesn't need to be sorted. That's our job.
Digitize & organize
We scan your prints, convert your DVDs, and gather your digital photos and videos into one place — labeled, dated where we can, and built into an archive you can navigate.
Discover the story
In conversation with you — or with the person the film is about — we find the moments, people, and themes that defined the life.
Create the film
We edit imagery, footage, voices, and music into a custom production, and refine it with you until it's right.
Preserve & share
You receive high-quality files ready for a memorial service, a living room television, private family sharing, and long-term archiving — plus your complete organized archive.
You're trusting us with things that cannot be replaced. We act like it.
Careful handling
Originals are inventoried on arrival, handled with archival practices, and returned to you along with the digital files.
Secure storage & transfer
Your digital files live in two places at once: secure cloud storage on Google Drive and a local backup drive in our Minneapolis studio. Sharing happens through private, permission-controlled links — never public posts.
Clear communication
You'll know where your project stands at every stage, with one person to call — not a ticket queue.
Privacy, absolutely
Your family's material is never used, shown, or shared without written permission. Films appear in our portfolio only with consent.
Local and personal
Your originals stay with us in Minneapolis. Nothing is shipped to a third-party processing facility.
No template factory
Your story is not outsourced, batched, or automated. It is edited, by a person, who knows your family's names.
A photograph can show us what happened. A story tells us why it mattered.
Every family has the box: hundreds of photographs, hours of home video, and fewer people every year who can say who's in them. When the context goes, the meaning goes with it — quietly, one generation at a time.
Ikiru Studios exists to interrupt that. The name comes from a film about a man who decides, late, to make his life mean something. In Japan, people gather each spring under the cherry trees for the same reason: the blossoms matter because they don't last. We think a life's meaning is usually already there — in the voices, the humor, the hard years, the ordinary Tuesdays. Our work is to find it, and to keep it tellable.
Every life leaves a story. Make sure yours is told.
Start with a conversation — no forms to labor over, nothing to upload, no obligation. Tell us what you have and who it's about, and we'll tell you honestly what we'd do with it.