Lights, Camera, Edit: My Journey Into Video Editing (And Why I’m Doing It in Public)
Because Why Not Learn a Whole New Skill Right Before the Year Ends?
Can you feel it? The weather is changing. It has become a bit more chilly, and stores in the US have begun to sell Christmas decorations even though we haven’t even reached Halloween yet. In Tel Aviv, supermarkets have started selling Sufganiyot or the special-hanukah-donut-filled-with-jam for you.
The end of 2024 will arrive in exactly 70 days from today.
What do you plan to do with your time until then? Do you have plans for 2025? I’d love to know.
I will spend the rest of 2024 learning to become a video editor with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects for Freelancing video edits in 2025.
In today’s post, I invite you to follow me as I develop this skill in public! Let’s talk about it.
2024 Was Hard And Opened My Eyes
In April 2024, I lost 66% of my total income and had to live with it for four months.
I bit my tongue and put on hold all of the things that were important to me to work on surviving.
And, most importantly, I hated that I let myself reach this situation.
You don’t think about losing your primary source of income until it happens. But it could happen no matter if you work in a corporate job or a startup. A small startup could run out of money; a corporate job could just cut you off one day.
Those four months and what they put me through will not be easily forgotten. And creating another income stream will help in making sure I’ll never be in that position again.
You Could Only Budget So Much
Budgeting allows you to survive. Raising your income beyond one income stream allows you to thrive with that budget.
The problem I had for years was that I didn’t want to trade more time for money. And thinking that freelancing would be the same as a day job, I focused on building passive income through blogs, YouTube, etc.
But I didn’t realize that I could trade value for money instead of time. In terms of video editing, that means you get paid for orders. When my video editor works on a video, I know the price, but I don’t know how much time they spent working on the video. It could be an hour, and it could be more. It shouldn’t matter.
A day job is different in that you get paid by the hour no matter what you’re working on.
If I can add another income stream that would provide extra cash without hurting my time too much, that would be a huge win and will allow me to tackle my financial goals and obstacles that much faster.
What Does It Mean For You?
I want to document building this skill and I’ll do that on Threads and X (I publish to both using HypeFury) and on this Substack.
So, if you follow me on those social media accounts, you’ll see more posts throughout the coming days until the end of 2024. Otherwise, I’ll use this Substack space to document my thoughts and results during the journey learning video editing in a more long-form kind of way. I will probably also include video posts (which I’ll also publish to my YouTube channel).
I intend to show before and after and also tutorials for the things I learn.
I don’t want commit to a schedule for this. I will probably post at least once a week, but committing to a schedule will restrict my flexbility. You’ll see my name in your inbox at least a few more times until the end of 2024 as long as you stay subscribed, don’t you worry :)
And if you’re asking yourself what kind of course I’m following, well it’s not a YouTube video. It’s a whole professional course I bought a while back for 6000 NIS which is about 1600 dollars. The course is copyrighted so I can’t share bits from it, but rest assured it has everything I need and in my native language - Hebrew - to make sure I don’t misunderstand things, and an active community where I can get help when I need it.
The person who offers the course has the credentials to do so and I trust him.
That’s All For Today!
Thanks for tuning in! I’m excited for what’s ahead. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, please let me know! I’d love to make this as comfortable for you as I can!
Make sure to subscribe if you aren’t already so you won’t miss the updates coming next week :)
Sending you love! See you in your inbox :)