Life Gets in the Way

The home in Florida had sold in a weekend. Then fell through. Then sold again in another 2 days. Now the race was on to find our new home up in Wisconsin. We were moving back to my wife's hometown. To be back in the midwest. To be near family.

By the time we pulled off the move the dream was getting farther and farther away! Now we were up in the new place...but everything was in boxes and the kids were off from school for the summer. What a mess. I burned months getting us situated.

Come fall - I had an idea for a YT vid that I thought would not only get a channel started, but also give me some practice with my editing skills. It was timely, "How to Hire 257 People in 5 Weeks" - during a time when everyone was struggling to find hires and candidates had their pick of jobs.

I did interviews, filmed hiring billboards all over town, mapped out marketing funnels, talked to ad purchasing execs, gathered data, interviewed an app creator of a hiring app that leveraged existing employees networks. I put so much into that vid. It really should have been 5 vids in hindsight. It took 5 weeks. What a distraction. But it gave me some necessary experience on the editing side that I was going to need.

I also knew how to make it better. I had to get through those learning curves.

And then I finally was ready to hit it with the course. I was promising that these new business owners with no design or online marketing experience, could get their lead generation campaigns online in a day.

So - I filmed myself doing all of necessary steps.

And once I started filming stuff happened. Camera would overheat, batteries would die mid-lesson, stuff was going wrong at every turn...(oh s#!t was the mic offline?) It took me about a week. 🙄

It was a ton of footage to export, organize and get into the editor (FCPX). Exporting and moving footage to get it to a place where I could work with it, that alone was 3 days.

5 weeks to edit it into 38 lessons. Music, SFX, intros, outros, On screen text overlays, visual effects, cover images, descriptions, color grading, audio adjustments (removing hum from the AC - voice clarity). I had an elaborate cheat sheet that I had created over the months of prep work. That turned out to be invaluable. An evernote, note that is long enough to run the length of my 27" monitor turned vertical, at least 3-4x's. I would have lost my mind had I not created that!!

I learned from that - and created a resource sheet for the students of the course.