Sorry For Your Loss was a drama about grief, starring Elizabeth Olsen as a young widow. Something happened after season one that nobody planned: the fans built a community around it. Thousands of people who'd lost someone started showing up in the show's Facebook group to tell their stories and hold each other up. For season two, Facebook Watch and Universal Music wanted Julia Michaels to write a song for the show. The easy version was a pretty studio session and a performance video. They wanted the song to come from the community itself.
Instead of filming Julia recording a finished track, we followed the song from the very beginning. Three chapters, each named for a stage of grief: Isolation, Transformation, and Hope. Julia sat down with real members of the group and listened. Then we followed her home, to the guitar, to the late-night humming, to the studio, watching their stories turn into a song in real time. The music video would be the third chapter, where it all came together.
The doc was built on conversations. Julia met six members of the group and heard about who they'd lost and who'd shown up for them. One of them, Carol, told her the women in that group were a tribe. You can hear it in the chorus.
The music video opens with them. Before Julia sings a note, the six members of the group look straight down the lens and tell you about the person they lost. No music, no b-roll, nothing to hide behind. I was standing just off camera for every one of those, and they're still some of the most powerful moments I've ever filmed.
Then the song starts. We built a set of big white backlit flats hung with empty frames of every size, like a gallery wall waiting for photos. Julia sat in the middle with an acoustic band, and the light did the storytelling. It starts as a thin slash across her face in the dark and grows through the song until it fills the whole room.
What Happened
The song came out two weeks before season two, followed by the doc and then the music video, timed to hit right before the premiere. The video has been watched more than 6 million times. But the part I care about most is that six people who'd been through the worst thing that ever happened to them got to watch their stories become a song, sung back to them in the same room.