Past Forward Studio is run by Lauren and Helmut, a husband-and-wife team based in the San Fernando Valley. We started the business because we needed it ourselves: we had boxes of old home videos and couldn't find an option that was local, fast and handled by someone we trust.

So we built that option ourselves. Since summer 2025, we've been digitizing tapes and discs for families across the San Fernando Valley and surrounding areas. There's nothing quite like handing someone back a memory they thought they'd lost, one box of tapes at a time.

By day, Helmut works as an aerospace engineer, studying how materials degrade and fail over decades of use. It turns out that's not so different from what happens to a VHS tape sitting in a closet for thirty years. When he's not doing rocket science, he brings that same care and attention to preserving your family's memories.