Memorial Tribute for Dan Duncan

A few weeks ago one of my clients, Dan Duncan, a well known businessman and philanthropist, passed away. His passing was unexpected and we were just days away from shooting new footage for a another tribute video on the Duncans. Both Dan and his wife Jan were chosen as the 2010 Tapestry Award recipients by Interfaith Ministries, a local non-profit whose mission is for all faiths to work together to create a more compassionate society.

Right after Dan passed away, Jan asked me if we could create a tribute to be shown at his memorial service, a week away. We had worked very closely with the Duncans previously, and while I’m usually not eager to work on memorial videos because of the short turn around time, I agreed because of my fondness for the Duncans and how much I enjoy working with them.

We ended up using a pretty good size piece of a previous video that focused on Dan’s personal history and expanded on that, adding in details about his work accomplishments, family, travel and hobbies. Fortunately we had quite a bit of previously unused footage we shot at the end of 2008 that we were able to utilize in the memorial. At one point, Jan and I were sitting together going over all the footage we’d shot of Dan talking about his life and she turned to me and said, “we are so lucky we have all this!” I couldn’t have agreed more.