I have filmed two hundred and forty-one weddings, and I have cried at none of them.
That is not coldness. It is professionalism. You cannot hold a camera steady while weeping, and couples do not pay for footage of a sobbing videographer reflected in a stained-glass window.
I learned that at my fourth wedding. The couple kept the shot anyway. They said it showed commitment.
My name is Jo Varga. I am forty, and I run Varga Wedding Video out of a converted dry cleaner on Pine Street in Ashby Falls. My mother, Ilona, founded the business in 1994. She filmed one hundred and seventy-one weddings before she handed me the camera and the debt.
Between us, that is four hundred and twelve weddings. Every one of them lives on clips.com.
If you have never used clips.com, it is a video storage site for people who make a living from moments. Photographers, videographers, the man in Fernhill who films retirement speeches. You pay eleven dollars a month. In exchange, clips.com promises to keep your footage forever.
That is their slogan. "Every Moment, Forever." It is printed on the welcome email, on every invoice, and on the little cartoon cloud that waves at you when you log in.
I opened my account ten years ago. That winter I digitized every one of my mother's tapes. It took four months and two VCRs, one of which caught fire.
I uploaded every wedding, labeled by couple, date and venue. After that, I uploaded each of my own weddings the night I finished editing it.
I am precise about this. I own a label maker. I own a second label maker in case the first one fails. When clients ask whether their footage is safe, I give them the same answer every time.
"Everything is backed up."
I am precise about one other thing. After every wedding, before I go home, I write one line in a notebook. It is the one thing that happened at that wedding and nowhere else, with the timecode.
My mother started the habit in 1994. She called it "the one thing." The notebooks now fill three banker's boxes, and she teases me that I write more than I film.
My mother does not trust clips.com. She does not trust anything she cannot kick.
"The cloud," she says, "is just someone else's basement."
She is sixty-eight. She still edits on a machine from 2003 that sounds like a dishwasher. She keeps her contacts in a leather book and her opinions in plain sight.
Her main hobby is watching curling. She records it on a VCR, onto whatever tape is nearest.
That last detail matters. Hold onto it.
Celeste Pell came into the studio on a Tuesday, two weeks before everything went wrong.
She was twenty-four, with a yellow raincoat and a planner so full it had a second planner clipped inside it. She worked in event logistics. She talked like someone who billed by the minute.
"My parents are having their twenty-fifth anniversary party," she said. "Saturday the twentieth, seven p.m., at Lakeside Grange Hall up in Lodenburg. A hundred and ten guests."
"Congratulations to them."
"Your mother filmed their wedding. June ninth, 2001. Saint Brigid's, then the Elks lodge."
She checked the planner. "I want a ten-minute film. Their wedding, cut down, with some photos from after. It's a surprise. They don't know I found you."
Lodenburg was three hours north. I told her I would deliver the film in person.
Then I typed "Pell" into the search bar on clips.com. The little cloud waved. And there it was, in my mother's era, in my label-maker font.
PELL / WHITCOMB — 06.09.2001 — ST. BRIGID'S — TAPES 1–3.
Celeste leaned over to look. On the thumbnail, a young woman in a lace dress was laughing at something off-camera. A young man in a rented gray tuxedo was pretending not to.
"That's my mom," Celeste said. Her voice went somewhere quieter for a second. Then it came back. "How long is the raw footage?"
"Two hours and fourteen minutes."
"Can you get it to ten?"
"I can get anything to ten."
She wrote that in the planner. I think she underlined it.
"Is it safe?" she asked. "It's been twenty-five years. My dad says everything from 2001 has rotted."
"Your dad's tapes might have," I said. "Ours didn't. Everything is backed up."
She nodded, wrote that down too, and paid the deposit on the spot. On her way out, she stopped in the doorway.
"One thing," she said. "Please don't put my dad's hobby in the film."
"What's his hobby?"
"We don't talk about it at family events." She buttoned the raincoat. "He gets intense."
Then she left. I didn't ask. In this business you learn not to ask about the father of the bride. Something is always behind the curtain, and it is usually a boat.
I planned to start the Pell cut on Wednesday night. It was the only open slot in my week.
I had two consultations on Thursday and a rehearsal dinner on Friday. I also had a nap scheduled for Saturday morning. I had been looking forward to it since August.
At 6:52 p.m. on Wednesday, I sat down with a coffee and opened my laptop.
The cloud did not wave.
Instead, there was a gray box in the middle of the screen.
Your clips.com account has been removed.
Our automated review system, Sieve, has determined that this account violates our Community Guidelines (Section 4.2: Repetitive Content).
All associated media is scheduled for permanent deletion in 72 hours.
Happy clipping!
I read it three times. The third time, I read it out loud, to see if it sounded more reasonable in a human voice. It did not.
"Repetitive content," I said to the empty studio.
My cat, Gimbal, looked up from the shelf where she sleeps between the spare batteries. She is eleven and has no opinions about cloud storage. She went back to sleep.
I logged out. I logged back in. The gray box returned, patient and polite.
I tried my phone. Same box. I tried the backup login I had set up in 2019, just in case. It said the account it was linked to no longer existed.
"Happy clipping," I said.
I want to be clear about what I felt in that moment, because it was not panic. Panic came later, at around three in the morning, and it brought snacks.
What I felt first was a kind of very cold arithmetic.
Four hundred and twelve weddings. Ten years of uploads. The local drives I used to keep had been "consolidated" when I moved the studio two years ago.
Consolidated is a word I invented so I would not have to say "recycled." I had trusted clips.com with everything, because clips.com had a cartoon cloud that said forever.
And my mother's original tapes were gone. I had always known that, the way you know things you have decided not to look at. The tapes went somewhere after I digitized them. I had just never asked where.
I called her. She picked up on the fifth ring, which means she was watching something.
"Is someone dead?" she said. That is how she answers the phone after six.
"No. Mom, your original wedding tapes. From before I digitized them. Where are they?"
There was a pause. In the background, I heard a crowd murmur, the long scrape of a stone on ice, and a man yelling, "Hurry! Hard!"
"Why?" my mother said.
"Clips.com deleted my account."
Another pause. Longer. Somebody on her television swept furiously.
"Well," she said. "I did tell you about the basement."
"Mom. The tapes."
"I'm thinking."
"You don't have to think. Either you have them or you don't."
"Joanna," my mother said. She used the voice she uses when she has done something and is deciding how to frame it. "How much curling do you think there has been since 2016?"
I closed my eyes.
On my screen, the gray box sat there, polite as a waiter. Under it, in small type, a countdown I had not noticed before was ticking.
71:58:14.
The Pell party was in seventy-two hours and eight minutes. I had eight minutes of margin and no footage.
Up next: Happy Clipping
Continue to Part 2 →