As many of you know I am the Founder and Director of Dance Wire. While most of the things I post here are about my freelance work rather than my Dance Wire work, I thought I'd share this video anyway.

One of my specialties is making little videos with an app called Video Star. I'm pretty sure it's an app teenagers use to make music videos of themselves, but I've discovered that it comes in handy rather often for me. In fact, it's the app I used to make the intro video for this Patreon page! The app allows me to add filters, text and effects, set a countdown timer before it starts filming, edit out the part where I run back to the camera to stop recording and much more. The video above was completely created, edited and published within an hour and a half.

So what is the video about? It's a thank you video. Now that Coral is a year and a half and finally in daycare three days a week, it was high time for me to get back to having an office space to work out of. I was originally planning to go back to the co-working space I had worked at before, until I was introduced to someone the week before Thanksgiving who offered a different option. She owns a two story office building in a prime location in Portland that is in limbo at the moment. The family has elaborate plans to develop the land but haven't come to an agreement with the city on some key details. In the meantime, they have decided to rent it out to arts organizations for a truly affordable price.

While it might not seem THAT exciting to most, it is exciting for me primarily because the people who own the building are truly some of the most welcoming, generous and innovative people I know. It was either a stroke of luck, or a stroke of fate that I landed here, but either way, I decided I wanted to make a grand entrance.

It worked. I sent it to the owner of the building this video with just a quick note that said thank you for being so welcoming and that I was doing my best to fill the space with dance. She responded by saying how much she loved the video and that it left her grinning "ear to ear". She also sent it to all other tenants of the building, and was still talking about it a week later when I saw her there.

I share this story because because it shows how using your creativity to make something for someone can have a big impact. Try it for yourself. Whether it's a dance, a song, a drawing, who knows, you could make a crossword puzzle dedicated to someone, the point is, it's creative, personal and deepens your bonds with others.