🎬 From Editing Stories to Helping People Tell Their Own Story: How BioGraffs Was Born

After decades of editing documentaries, I started to see something clearly: our minds are like an editor, creating meaning out of the footage that comes in to our brains through the senses.

We move through the world gathering experiences — moments, impressions, the things people say to us, the things that happen — but the experiences alone aren’t the story. They’re just the material. The story comes later, when we shape it, when we decide what matters, and when we choose how to connect the dots.

In the editing room, that act of shaping is everything. Watching hours of footage isn’t enough; it’s the selection, the arrangement, the structure that creates meaning. That’s how you turn happenings of the world into stories that move people.

Editing as Metaphor

Over the years, I realized that this isn’t just what editors do with film: It’s what people do in their own lives. We are meaning makers constantly. We almost can't function without making meaning out of what we see, touch, and feel.

It also is what causes us pain when we choose meanings that hurt. This is the core principle of Buddhism and the Four Noble truths: Life is painful, the suffering comes from our mind, if we can control our mind, we can release ourselves from the suffering (or dissatifaction, or stress).

When I’m editing, one of my essential tools is the wall of cards — each card a story beat, laid out in space where I can see the whole arc at once. Without it, I can’t hold all the pieces in my mind at the same time. I can’t see how the parts relate. I can’t feel the shape of the larger story.

Being able to see the structure — to get outside of the chaos of raw material and into a visual, spatial map of meaning — changes everything. It lets me understand the big picture. It lets me see where the story needs to go.

Helping People Tell Their Own Story

At some point, I started wondering: what if people could do this with their inner lives too? What if there was a way to externalize the messy, unstructured feelings inside — not just in words, but visually — and see their story as something they could shape, hold, and share?

That’s where BioGraffs began.

I wanted to create a tool that would help people tell their own story. A way for people to lay out their experiences outside themselves, arrange them, reframe them, and even transform them — the way I’ve always done with raw footage.

When everything stays inside your head, it’s easy to get trapped. Words can tangle into loops. Emotions can overwhelm logic. You can lose the shape of what’s really happening. But when you create a visual narrative, you step back. You become the editor of your own story instead of just the subject trapped inside it.

BioGraffs gives people a way to make meaning visual, to see how one idea leads to another, how feelings and actions and experiences connect. It’s a way to hold the whole frame at once, and to share it — not just explain it — with someone else.

In editing, showing someone a cut is always more powerful than trying to describe it. In the same way, sharing your story visually invites another person to really see you, to walk through your experience alongside you.

The act of storytelling, especially visual storytelling, is powerful because it creates distance without detachment. You can step outside your story just enough to shape it. To understand it. To change it if you want to.

BioGraffs grew from my belief that storytelling isn't just something we do to entertain each other. It’s how we make sense of life. It's how we create meaning out of what feels chaotic. It's how we connect.

And just like every documentary I've ever edited, the raw footage of life is only the beginning.The real power comes when we shape it into a story we can see, share, and grow from.

Interested? Check it out!