Built in Hawaiʻi, for institutions that were too.

Rise Media Group works with companies, schools, hospitals and foundations whose history is older than the photographic record of it — and takes what was only ever remembered or written down, and makes it something people can watch.

Most of what happened to an institution in its first fifty years was never photographed. Not because it did not matter, but because a camera was rare, film was expensive, and nobody knew at the time which ordinary Tuesday would turn out to be the story.

What survives is words — in two forms. Some of it is written down: a ledger, a minute book, an obituary, a few brittle prints nobody has looked at since the last move. The rest is carried by people, and has never been written down at all.

Both films on this site came almost entirely from that second kind. Cy Kalama and Paulette McLain sat down and told us what they remembered, and every picture in those films was built from their telling. There was no footage to find. There was a person who was there.

We research that record, record the people who still remember, and rebuild what was never captured. Every reconstructed frame traces to a documented source, and every film says plainly what was made and what was not.

Our researchers and story leads are trained through the RiseHI Creative AI Accelerator, a Hawaiʻi workforce program, and hired here at market rates. The films about this place are made by people from it.