What we do with your data, plainly.

Gentle Frame Studio, Belgium, is the controller of the data described here. You can reach us at hello@gentleframestudio.com. Company registration details will be added here once the studio is registered.

The contact form asks for your name, your email address, what your message is about and the message itself; the memorial intake may also ask for a date. We use this only to answer you and to prepare a conversation. Messages are sent to our mailbox through Resend (our email provider) and kept in that mailbox for as long as the conversation is relevant, at most two years after our last exchange.

To keep bots out, the form quietly discards submissions that show automated behaviour. Nothing about you is stored for that purpose.

If we work together, we create a client record with your name, email address and, when needed for documents, your company name, VAT number and address. You sign in to the client portal with a one-time link sent to your email; there is no password. In the portal we keep your projects, the updates we write to you, quotes, invoices and contracts, payment records and, when you sign a contract online, your typed name, email address, the time, your IP address, your browser type and a fingerprint of the document you agreed to. That record is what makes the signature valid.

Invoices and their supporting records are kept for the period Belgian accounting law requires (currently seven years). Other client data is removed when the relationship ends and you ask us to, or after five years of inactivity.

For a memorial film you share photographs, videos, voice messages and stories about someone who has died, and often about living family members too. We treat this material as confidential. It is used only to make your film, is never published, reused or shown without the family’s written consent, and is deleted from our working files on request once the film is delivered. The finished film is yours.

The site and the portal run on Vercel; the portal database and file storage run on Supabase in Frankfurt (EU); email is sent through Resend and received through ImprovMX. These providers process data on our behalf under their own data processing agreements. Some of them may transfer data outside the EU under the safeguards the GDPR allows.

We use Vercel Web Analytics to see which pages are visited and from which country. It does not use cookies and does not identify you; it stores no personal data, which is why you don’t see a cookie banner here. The site sets a small technical value in your browser to remember that you have seen the opening animation, and a session cookie when you sign in to the portal.

You can ask us at any time what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, ask for a copy, or object to a use you disagree with. Write to hello@gentleframestudio.com and we answer within a month. If you feel we handled your data badly, you can complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority (gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be), though we would rather hear from you first.

If we change how we handle data, we update this page and the date at the top. Substantial changes are announced to clients in the portal.