Welcome back to another edition of creator reflection.

In this written series, I document my journey towards becoming a successful creator within content creation, filmmaking, storytelling, photography and beyond. I share my milestones, realizations, challenges and growth so that it may assist others’ journeys too.

In this entry, we’ll be covering:

• punching above your weight class in skill
• why I’m taking creativity less seriously and learning to have fun again
• slowly but surely transitioning out of freelance

and more. Let’s get into it.

How did I move forward?

By far, the biggest win was everything I did behind the scenes to prepare myself for success with performance consulting and getting my first client. W. As I’ve mentioned before, this is the path forward for me. Not only is this a major aspect of my life’s work, but the high ticket price point and significantly increased hourly rate will allow me to have more way more time freedom so that I can fully commit to this business and and get back to consistently creating content for myself again. Getting my first client and working with them has been such a gift and has grown me so much already. I can’t wait to build my clientele up to the point where I can finally fully let go of freelance marketing/creative as my main source of income and absolutely dominate.

Worked on editing 5 different videos. While none are complete yet, I partially edited 3 main channel videos and 2 second channel videos from the archives. It might seem like an L from the outside that I haven’t posted them yet, but moving forward on these videos and getting momentum again — especially when I got momentum with the hook on the first moving video — has been absolutely incredible. You should see these videos in Q2.

Wrote and filmed a video around me shaving my head bald. It was absolutely incredible to have a controlled environment and be able to move everything around to get the necessary shots and have all the gear out 24/7 to get exactly what I needed with no pressure from other roommates. I love living alone. It’s the best. And I love being bald. Video coming soon.

Strong improvement towards letting go of a certain level of quality. I think like I’ve said this in most reflections, but with each reflection comes a new level of detachment. This time, I’m finding that I don’t need to make films, but rather, it’s best to get back to making videos consistently again. I want to just get back to the basics, not chopping for an algorithm (in a robotic, lifeless way), but for the people who are going to watch, enjoy and connect with what’s being said.

Studying music and sound design. I am so intrigued with this aspect of video editing right now. Most notably, I brought in some of Ryan Trahan’s videos into my timeline and began taking notes on what was going on and it really opened up a lot for me. It showed me how little we detect the imperfections as listeners, that I can re-use music to create themes throughout the video, and to use sound effects to transition scenes, songs, and moods. Ever since, I’ve been able to see the matrix and I’ve been working on upgrading my library of sound effects. You’ll see a lot more sound design occur from me going forward because it’s critical to the overall experience of an edit, and it’s something I’ve been sleeping on for my entire editing career.

Finding creative ways to do lightweight animation. Could I learn to do proper animations? Yes. Do I want to invest the time into doing so? Nah, not really. Instead, I acquired a whiteboard + a c-stand for overhead white board shots, inspired by Casey Neistat and Peter Lindgren’s various approaches to overhead shots and visual representations in the real world. Additionally, seeing my good friend Kyle Pritchard’s creative approach to animations like using transparent UI overlays, custom writing and slapping it onto a video in a clean way, I was very inspired to find creative ways to achieve animations in my own way. So I’ve been messing around a lot more recently with various apps in dark mode and utilizing them as overlays. I even grabbed a cheap stylus off of Amazon and created a wonderful A+ animation for upcoming. I can’t wait to spend even more time in this arena and get really creative with things.

Ability to tell a story and be entertaining on camera. I got on camera a few times to film some tests or documentation videos without any script and I’m impressed at how far I’ve come. Something’s just clicked — maybe it’s my mildly-unhealthy dedication to retention within editing, valuing people’s time or spending so much time thinking about stories that I’m subconsciously able to do this now in long form — but watching those videos back, I was always telling a story, occupying little dead time and I found it genuinely enjoyable to watch.

Shifting my main focus in content from politics to self improvement. While politics and world events are still very much in the background, the main focus is back to levelling up, because personal excellence is the ultimate rebellion.¹Can’t thank Andy Frisella enough for this switch in perspective last year So far, this shift has been incredible. It’s amazing to get back to the origins of what I originally made content about from 2017-2020, but better.

Acquired some new gear. I got a DJI wireless lapel mic, a C-Stand for overhead shots and an adaptor to allow me to finally use the Manfrotto BeFree but with Arca Swiss (this tripod has genuinely been chilling here for a year now without any use because I dislike the manfrotto quick release plate so much and I absolutely love Arca Swiss).

Back ups. While I still have ways to go on my the system I’m building for storage, backups and archiving, I did get myself started with some good local backups of data and media that was previously only in the cloud and could’ve vanished if my accounts were terminated. Feels nice to be heading in the right direction.

Edited and produced a course for a client. Though definitely a love/hate project at times, it’s cool to say that I helped make a course.

What requires improvement?

My attachment to the quality of my writing, especially when documenting is involved. What I expected to be the shortest written reflection to date (continuing the trajectory of shorter and shorter posts each year) ended up becoming a behemoth at over 10,000 words. I found myself incredibly attached to the quality of my writing, especially because the intention was to document my journey and I wanted my level of writing to stand the test of time when I would eventually come back and revisit it — and, for even more added pressure — reuse and reference it in future content. It took me a full month of almost daily writing to ship this and it set me back way longer than expected with this year’s work, all because of my ridiculous level of attachment. I was doing really well for a minute there with detachment from creative, but this experience really humbled me. I’m really hoping that by the end of this year I address the underlying patterns here because I really dislike spending too much time documenting my journey like I once vigorously did. Overall, it was a really discouraging start to the year, but I persevered and it’s been on up and up ever since.

Doing any freelance at all. I’m so over this. I’m doing my best to be patient, but there is almost no part of me that wants to put any time or energy into freelance anymore. I procrastinate so badly because all I want to work on is my own stuff — it’s insane over this line of work I am. While I’ve known this for 5 months now, the clarity just keeps getting more and more intense — I need to get out ASAP. I’m so thankful that I have a clear path forward with performance consulting that has tremendous potential and will allow me to be even more creative in the net score. Though I am grateful for my current situation — the people I’m working with and how much much I’m being paid — and I could continue in theory, there’s nothing worse than knowing you’re capping your potential and that’s what I’m doing right now by continuing on with this work.

Using a shot gun mic. For shots where I’m not right next to the camera or mic, it just sounds off. Or, if I turn my head or shoulders when I’m speaking, the sound is off too. I need a mic for shots from a distance, but I didn’t want it to be tacky and visible. So I researched more into how people hide lapels and was blown away to realize that lapel mics are the meta right now and I’d been watching tons and tons of people using them without even realizing it. And being that I want to do film more out in the wild and with shots from a distance without losing sound quality, this was a must to switch from the good ol’ shot gun mic to a wireless mic.

My music library for content. I want my collection of copyright free music to be organized by genre, mood and potential use case, but not through folders. Through metadata, tags, whatever’s necessary. Then, I want to be able to easily filter it all. Still haven’t figured out how to do this but this is of utmost importance for me for finding the right songs quickly.

Media asset management. Whether it’s raw footage, exports, selects, re-usable, past photography, screenshots, music, stock footage, memes, whatever — my approach to organizing my media requires a serious revamp. I want to set up a system that allows me to easily resurface the right media at the right time for amazing re-usability, and do it in an affordable, secure and accessible way.

Letting go of footage when multiple shots are available. For example, if I have 2 shots, my brain can really stress out at times around which of the two I should keep. Or, if I have multiple angles to cut to, which do I choose and will I need the other for reusability or repurposing? Man, I have a lot to heal here. I overthink so much of creation right now, it’s bonkers.

How much my content is about me. If I want my content to pop, it’s going to need to be more resource based, informational content. I might be the subject of the content, but the main focus is going to be on the audience. You’ll see what I mean once it happens, but a great example could be something like “I quit caffeine”. While I’m the “guinea pig” that quitting caffeine and sharing the transformation, realizations and hacks, it’s ultimately focused on how you can benefit from this experience and how you can achieve this too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be making it. Can’t wait to execute upon all the ideas I have in store, as I have a bunch of similar ideas coming soon.

This pattern I have of putting things off until later, resistance to shipping creative work. It manifests in all forms of content creation, especially when there’s no deadline or timeline that I must ship it by.

Being “behind”. I’ve said this for many reflections in a row now, but this concept of just being behind in content — it just sucks. It makes me not want to film anything because I don’t want to expand the list of footage I need to go through and edit, and I don’t want to perpetuate the state/experience/feeling of going through old content by appending new footage to the back of the queue. So, I practically never record right now unless it’s for the straight up archives. It’s also a terrible feeling to know that the videos I first post when I’m back are all going to be filled with footage from over a year ago, but it’s what’s required of me so I’ve just gotta do it anyways because I want to create a new situation. I miss creating without the weight of all the other content I need to get to before this. I miss creating, editing and posting with speed. I miss creating from a place of excitement, freshness. I am so ready to get back to creating in real time again and not be bogged down by documenting my journey. I want to instead use the newfound time and energy to create content relevant to me and my future audience as it’s happening, and make amazing content with huge growth potential that allows me to build up a passionate audience. I look forward to getting back into a healthy flow and cycle of creation again, because creating from behind absolutely sucks.

All the unfinished pieces of content. I have literally hundreds and hundreds of pieces of content, which is somewhere in the written, filming or editing process but was never brought to completion. Part of me wants to go through this bit by bit, extract the gold from the past creations and post it on locals/second channel as throwback content, or find creative ways to insert it into upcoming videos. And another part of me wants to never make the time for this and let it all go lol. We shall see.

The newsletter. It was inactive throughout Q1 as it was a low priority, but I began working on it again in the final days of the quarter. It’s great to get back to consistently creating on this, as it’s a low lift format when I take the pressure off of it and create like a normal human being — it’s actually fun. This time, I’ve got to be careful to not get trapped in the habits of 1) pushing off the v2+ writing sessions 2) and then use AI to double check my grammar, as I put off the editing + review stage big time. I also need to set up the actual newsletter technology, as I’ve been delaying on this HARD.

How much I overthink the little things. Nothing matters as much as my mind thinks things do.

Subtitles in DaVinci Resolve. I was about to write about how unacceptable it is that they still don’t have AI subtitles in 2023 and I needed to pay for 3rd alternatives instead, but they finally announced it in the end of April. I’m so excited about this update, including another game changing feature called transcription, which is one of the most useful editing features I’ve seen in a very long time.

Camera quality. My brain is getting so finely tuned to camera quality now and I really want something with a crisp, sharp picture quality, like the Sony A7IV. While I’m grateful for the ZV-1 and I know most people can’t see any difference, I can see the difference in the details now and it’s nowhere as sharp as I want the image to be. If all goes according to plan, I should be able to get a full frame camera by year end.

iPhone 14 Pro Max camera quality. The photos and videos are so over processed… I want to find apps that allow me to shoot in a way where I don’t get this unnecessarily sharp, contrasted, and over processed output. The obvious solution is to simply shoot in ProRAW but I don’t want RAW sizes for every image, nor do I want the pressure of editing every picture I take. I also want to find way to shoot in a flat profile for video, as the videos just look off when placed right beside camera footage. I’ve been experimenting with multiple solutions and will continue to do so.

What did I learn?

My content is aligned with the performance consulting business. In the past, I viewed these 2 seemingly separate things as having some overlap in audience, but because performance consulting was originally positioned with more of an emphasis on energy work as the main offering, I viewed them as having very different niches. But now, as I shift this business towards improving performance and maximizing one’s potential in business, it’s clear as day that the audiences are completely aligned with who I want to make content for. And that means my content is about to become a marketing machine. This is going to be so much fun. I can’t wait.

Focus on making videos, not films. I got very caught up for a minute there in shooting above my weight class, performing above my skill level. I wanted to be make the best possibly films I could; I yearned for making Hollywood level content, even though I was making storytelling videos all on my own. I took the entire process way too seriously, perfectionism crippled me and I lost over a year of progress on my main channel. At this point, I want to just make videos again and get back to things being fun. It’s come to my awareness that not only do the videos not need to be perfect, but neither do the shots. I can use memes, I can use bad shots, I can use low quality iPhone footage, I can use photos. It doesn’t matter. Whatever tells the story in the best possible manner, I can use. I’ve taken things off of a pedestal and I’m just getting back to having fun with things again. Instead of making perfectly shot films with top of the line footage and looks like it has a multi-million dollar budget, I’m letting myself use whatever I want, mess around more, lean into humour again, edit for people instead of algorithms, and really just make whatever I feel like. It’s better like this.

The footage you deem pointless now might become the key media in your story. In the moving video part 1, I needed shots to represent my old rooms/living situations. Going back in time to the good old media library of the 2010’s, I found casual shots I captured of my room that were throwaway shots at the time. Thank god I didn’t think much of it at the time, I kept them anyways, and now they serve as a great way of visually expressing what I already see in my minds eye with the rest of you. This experience really reaffirmed the importance of filming things even if you might not need them today, because you might need them tomorrow.

I don’t need to make every video a highly edited video filled with mostly b-roll. I can make informational content and bring in the b-roll here and there to add whenever possible to improve the experience, but it’s not as important as my ego tells me it is. I got very obsessed with making storytelling-esque videos for a minute there, but I can feel my next iteration will be going back to topic based videos and using b-roll as a secondary tool to keep people engaged, with the information and insights being the most important.

Get a lapel mic. I was oblivious to how many people use them these days and it turns out most of my favourite creators do, but they’re good at hiding them. This allows you to get great audio from a distance, which is critical if you want to make videos out in the wild, which I absolutely do. Bonus tip, you can use shot gun + lapel for back ups and hybrid percentages.

Final thoughts

Really hope to get back in real time with content creation within the next quarter or 2, and be out of freelance by the end of next quarter so I can absolutely go all in on performance consulting and creativity again. This is the way forward for me.

If you made it this far, I appreciate you taking the time to read my thoughts and experiences. Hope this brought you a lot of value.