Back to School, One Last Time: The Video for the Family With a Senior

If your family has a kid starting senior year of high school this fall, the next twelve months are going to move faster than any year before it. The first day of senior year is, in retrospect, the last "first day" you will ever get with that kid at home. Most families don't realize that until the year is over.

The video to build right now is a montage of every first day of school you have photos of, narrated as a single essay. Kindergarten through twelfth grade. The backpack changes, the kid changes, the front porch changes, and the video ends on the photo you take this September. The narration will do the rest.

How to build it well:

• The notes matter more than the photos. Write one sentence per year about what was happening in the family that fall. New baby. New house. The year the dog died. The narration is what turns eighteen snapshots into a story.
• Documentary is the only right tone here. This isn't a cute video; it's a quiet one, and the narrator should sound like an adult who has been paying attention.
• Don't finish editing it. Leave the senior year as a single placeholder photo with the date. Add the rest of the photos as they happen through the year. By next August, you'll have a complete narration without ever having to sit down and "make" one.

This is the video families show at graduation. It is also the video that gets rewatched, alone, on a Tuesday night in October, by a parent who isn't ready for what just happened.