It started with four days, a thousand emails, and one very long week before graduation.

At a school in Sydney, there’s a tradition that’s been running for years. Every Year 12 valedictory night, as a surprise for the graduating students, the parents secretly submit baby photos of their children. Then, on the big night, with the whole hall watching, a presentation plays where each student’s baby face slowly morphs into their Year 12 portrait.

It’s always the highlight of the evening. Everyone leans forward trying to guess whose baby photo is on screen. There are gasps, laughter, and more than a few tears. Over the years, it evolved — teachers started getting added at the end, which is always a crowd favourite. Even the head gets involved.

Then the person doing it left.

The teacher who had been creating the morph presentation for years moved to another school. Someone needed to take it on. That someone was Jamie — a substitute teacher who said yes without quite realising what he was signing up for.

He learned the software. He sat down. And he quickly discovered what “four days of work” actually meant.

Hundreds of emails from parents. Downloading each photo one by one. Cataloguing them by the student’s surname. Matching each baby photo to the right Year 12 portrait. Then, for every single student, manually placing feature points on both faces so the morph would run smoothly — eyes, nose, mouth, jawline, one pair at a time.

After four solid days of this, you’d finally have a finished presentation. Then you’d watch through the whole thing, checking that no student had been missed, that every morph looked right, and chasing up the parents who still hadn’t sent their photos. More emails. More back and forth.

And that was just the editing. Before Jamie even opened the software, he spent two weeks chasing parents for baby photos. Emails that bounced. Parents who meant to send them but forgot. Reminders at assembly. Notes in school bags. Some parents just never responded, and those students missed out.

It was worth it — the moment on the night is genuinely special. But the process of getting there was painful.

A conversation in Bali.

Jamie went on holiday to Bali with a friend who happens to be a software developer. Over drinks, he was telling his mate that the morphing season was coming up again, and he was dreading the four-day marathon.

His friend listened and said: “What if parents just got a link to click? They upload the photo themselves, the system organises everything by student name, and it automatically chases anyone who hasn’t sent one yet. You’d never have to write another individual email.”

They started sketching it out. A simple upload link for each parent. Automatic reminders as the deadline got closer. A dashboard showing exactly who had submitted and who hadn’t. And once every photo was in — everything matched, organised, and ready to go, without Jamie having to rename a single file.

If they could build that, the whole job might actually become manageable. And if it worked for Jamie’s school, it would work for every school — because the photo-chasing problem is the same everywhere.

That conversation turned into SchoolMorph.

The first thing they built was not the morphing engine — it was the photo collection system. Because the morphing was only half the problem. The other half was getting 150 parents to actually send their photos on time.

Built by someone who’s actually done the job.

SchoolMorph isn’t built by a tech company guessing at what schools need. It’s built by a teacher who has sat through the emails, the late nights, and the panic of realising a student was missed the day before the ceremony.

Every decision we make comes back to one question: would this have saved Jamie time during that week before graduation? If the answer is yes, we build it. If not, we don’t.

The leavers’ night moment is magic. Getting there shouldn’t be misery.