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
One detail from the interview is easy to miss but says a lot about how the studio operates: WeDoVids built its early reputation shooting news for all four Dayton television stations, a genuinely unforgiving, deadline-driven environment to cut their teeth in. That same instinct to adapt fast showed up again in 2020, when the studio pivoted to livestreaming and video production for nonprofits that had lost their usual in-person fundraising events to the pandemic. Brian frames it less as a pivot and more as a continuation of the community-minded values the studio has carried since it started.
From subscription fatigue to FrameCourier
The part of the interview most relevant to this blog is the section on FrameCourier itself. Brian describes the same origin story we've written about here before, juggling Dropbox and Frame.io, paying for tools that never talked to each other, and eventually building a private client portal in 2018 just to solve WeDoVids' own delivery headaches. What comes through clearly in the interview is that FrameCourier was never treated as a side project. It was refined against real client work for years before WeDoVids ever considered opening it up, and Brian is direct about why: the platform was shaped by people running an actual studio, not a team guessing at what one might need.
A partnership that changed shape without ending
The interview is also candid about something a lot of company profiles would leave out entirely: Sarah and Brian's relationship changed over the years the business existed, and Sarah's role with the studio changed along with it. She now works with WeDoVids as an independent contractor rather than in an owner-operator capacity day to day, a shift Brian describes as requiring "honest conversations, clear boundaries, and restructuring how we collaborate." Her eye and expertise, by his account, remain central to what the studio delivers. We appreciated that the interview didn't gloss over this; it is a more honest picture of how a long-running creative partnership actually works than the tidier version most companies put in their own marketing.
Where Brian sees the industry heading
Asked about the next five to ten years, Brian's answer lands on a theme that shows up throughout FrameCourier's own product decisions: AI is going to keep absorbing the repetitive parts of editing and color work, and the studios that treat it as a tool rather than a threat will be the ones that come out ahead. The through-line of the whole interview, that technology should serve the story rather than the other way around, is the same instinct behind most of what FrameCourier has shipped.
Read the full interview
This only covers a few pieces of a much longer conversation. For the complete interview, including more on WeDoVids' day-to-day work and Brian's full thinking on where the industry is headed, read it directly at Voyage Ohio Magazine.