Speaker 1: So I do manage to get the first editing job, but then the director and producers are standing over my shoulders while I can't figure out how to plug in the hard drive, and I realize, oh my editing career is over before I even got to open Adobe Premiere. Hey, I'm Kent Lyon from Standard Story Company. I make short films, feature films, but I also have a day job as a video editor. I've worked for clients like Netflix, Apple, Beats by Dre, Air Jordan, and I'm going to talk about how I made the transition into becoming a video editor from being a waiter at a steakhouse. Not even a good steakhouse, we took coupons. Black Angus. It only took me three months and you can do the same thing. If you're an independent filmmaker, I always recommend video editing as a day job because you can really sharpen your skills, hone in your storytelling, hone in your ability to think like an editor while you're shooting. You'll make great contacts, and you'll make really solid money, and there's a really high demand for video editing. Now the only reason I even started on this journey of becoming an editor was I was editing a web series I had also directed, and the producers were in the room with me while I was re-editing an episode, and they said, wow you're really good at this, you should be an editor. And I was like, huh, an editor? In my mind up until then it had always been either you're a director, or you're a waiter, or a valet, or a dog walker, whatever random jobs I was doing up until then to support my filmmaking habit. Once I did the research and found out how much money editors actually make, I realized, wow, it really doesn't make any sense for me to keep working these odd jobs if I can use the skills I already have to make that much more money. So I set a series of deadlines for myself, I created an entire plan of how I was going to transition into becoming an editor, and to my great surprise it actually worked really well and much faster than I thought it would. So first I'm going to break down my plan, and then I'm going to show you how it actually went down. My program was Adobe Premiere, that's what I'd made all my short films on, so I was going to really brush up on my skills there. There's a lot I needed to catch up on if I was going to be able to succeed in a professional editing environment. Next I was going to reach out to everybody, whether I knew them or it was a complete cold call, and learn everything I could about editing and freelance editing and the entire landscape of this part of the industry, and hopefully it would lead to some work down the road, but if not, at least I would know how to present myself and try to land some jobs. Then I was going to put a resume together, put a reel together, and start applying for jobs and for gigs as an assistant editor. In my head I already felt like I had the skills to be an editor, but I know that you have to pay your dues, so I was prepared to go for up to a year as an assistant. During that time I'd be pretty aggressively networking and trying to find new clients and raising my rates, and eventually position myself as an editor, and that would be my job. So that was my plan. I figured it would take about a year to get there, but in the end it only took three months, so here's what actually happened. So step one was to hone in on my editing skills, learn all the shortcuts, learn the proper workflows, learn all the technical stuff that I just didn't know. If you're trying to be a working editor, there are really only two paths I can recommend that would be either Avid or Adobe Premiere. For me, I was an Adobe Premiere guy, that's what I'd been using in my own short films, so I went on lynda.com. I did these two long, thorough Premiere courses. They give you the working files that you can edit along with the instructor. Learned a ton of fundamentals that I'd completely missed while making my own films. I was completely self-taught up to this point. And then I started making flashcards for all the Adobe Premiere shortcuts that I didn't know. So all the hotkeys, studied them. A couple days later I had them all in my head. Really not that hard, and it saves you so much time editing. I can't believe I made as many short films as I did without knowing those. A lot of wasted time there. During this time I'm also going on Google, on Reddit. I'm consuming as much content as I can about what it means to be an editor. I'm just learning everything I possibly can. Now this is where things start to get exciting. I was amazed at how quickly I found my first paying gig. So I joined this Facebook group called I Need an Editor. Find a post on there with somebody with an assistant editor assignment that starts the next day. Take an old reel that's like a directing slash editing reel, and I send that to them in a Facebook message along with my rate, which I had no idea how to set my rate. So I just said $150. And to my great surprise, an hour later he messaged me back saying, hey can you jump on a call? I can jump on a call. A few minutes later it's just like, great can you meet at this place tomorrow? I can't believe it. I really thought it was going to take way longer than this to find my first even assistant editing gig. And this is literally the first one that I applied to. So I go to this fancy co-working space in Hollywood. It's got carbonated water on tap. On tap. I meet the editor. He's this very established editor from New York. They flew him out here for this project and he shows me what I'm doing. I'm basically just making multicam sequences, syncing up things, making really rough cuts to send to him so he can polish it up and make it look good. So I get through that first day and it turns into a full week of work. At the time, coming from working as a waiter, that was great money. I was like, hey I'm making money doing things I actually like doing. This is crazy. And anytime I had a lunch break or any downtime at all, I would go to the editor and I would ask him everything I could think of that I couldn't find online. I would ask him his opinion about things like my resume, my reel. I would ask him why he hired me over other people. He gave me an incredible masterclass on being a freelance editor. And he told me, hey don't be offended. I didn't really watch your reel. I just looked at your resume. I saw we had a mutual friend in common. I saw your rate was really low and that you were available. And that was good enough for me. He showed me his own editing reel, which was only 60 seconds long, even though he'd worked on these major music videos and these big commercials. Mine was two and a half minutes long. It was just my own like crappy short film, so I knew I had to cut that way down. He told me how to deal with clients. He told me how to set my rates. He told me the next time I applied for an assistant edit gig, I should charge $200 or $250 a day. Just to give you an idea of how green I was when I did this job, I didn't even know how to submit my invoice. I knew nothing about it. I had to ask the editor, hey how do I get paid? And he was like, you have to make an invoice. I was like, oh okay. How do I make an invoice? If I didn't have him giving me this advice, would it take me a lot longer to figure all this stuff out? So the job ended. I got paid. That editor flew back to New York, which was a big bummer because I was like, damn the one real editor I know lives on the other side of the country. I went back to working at the restaurant, but I was able to say, hey I'm a professional assistant editor now. I'd done it once, right? That's all it takes. I've got experience. I also continued to network. I knew of one guy that somebody told me was now working as a freelance video editor. So I met up with him for coffee, picked his brain for a while, and eventually he gave me the contact info of an old client of his that I didn't work with anymore. That ended up being the perfect person for me to get into contact with. This was a small production company in Los Angeles that did internal corporate videos for this giant film studio. I didn't ask for a job. I just emailed them some questions about what they look for in an assistant editor and an editor. They emailed me back a couple days later with the answers and they wanted to know about myself, and eventually asked me to come in for a quick face-to-face meeting. And then a couple weeks later I get a call from them asking me to come in and edit something for them as like a trial project. They're going to pay me $250 a day. Two hundred and fifty dollars? But more importantly, I had been promoted to editor. Not assistant editor. I'm an editor now. So I knew this was a huge opportunity and if I make the most of it, I never have to go back to assistant editing. I can skip that entire year that I had planned for myself of assistant editing before I jump up to that next level. So I go in and it's actually an edit for that big client of theirs. And it's this talking head corporate video with a lot of different interviews, a lot of footage to go through to tell a cohesive like seven minute long story. Looking back on it, I was a little too novice at the time to be able to handle that project. So what happens is we get to Friday and the client comes in and he says, hey we're going to be able to get a first version out on Monday, right? And I'm like yeah, no problem. And in my head I'm like there's no way. So we had to upload all the raw interviews up onto Frame.io which is this review website. So I memorized the password for their Frame.io account. I went home and that entire weekend I poured over those interviews. I actually grabbed a pen and paper and through each interview I would write down the quotes that I liked and the time code that the quote appeared. And I created a paper edit of the entire video by hand. But that Monday I showed up. I took the notepad and it was just like following instructions. I quickly assembled the edit. Of course I didn't let them see the notepad. I didn't want them to know what I had done that entire weekend. And at the end of the day they watched it. They were like, hey good job. And I was like thanks, no problem. They brought me back in a few weeks later for like a month long project. This time the rate got bumped up to $300 a day. Again, still very low but at the time, big money. But then it gets even better. Right after that job ends, I get a phone call from an unknown number. That editor that I had worked for as an assistant editor who's in New York now, he had gotten a request to edit something for this client in LA. He recommended me because he knew it was a really simple project. So I've literally just finished my first editing assignment and they asked me what my rate is. And I'm like, well I did this job for $300 so obviously it's $400. And they say, yeah no problem. And I was like, oh my god I could have asked for way more. And this client's very different from the one I just worked for. This one's an ad agency. I walk in. I'm like, I am not cool enough to be here. Everybody has tattoos. So immediately I meet the director. I meet the producers. They hand me this hard drive. The director's telling me, hey we're doing this shoot right now but we're going to be editing while we shoot just to make sure we're getting everything right. I'm like, sure sounds good. He's talking at me rapid fire. We get to this little edit suite and they're like, go ahead and throw that hard drive in and I'll show you what we've shot so far today. Up until this point, I've been working on PC for like the past five years. And most professional editing jobs you find out here, people are using Macs. I was so green that I literally did not recognize a Thunderbolt 2 port. I looked at it and I was like, what is that? Is that Firewire? I am not seeing a port that fits. Meanwhile, more people keep piling into the room waiting for me to plug this thing in. There's just complete silence. I go into a full body sweat. I was about to ask them, hey I don't think this computer has a Firewire port. The director pops in, hey does that computer not have Thunderbolt 2? He gives me the adapter. I'm like, oh this hole fits into this hole. Once I actually start working, everything's fine. At the end of the day, there's these gift baskets that the agency was going to give to the clients, but their courier fell through. Everybody was really wiped out. They didn't want to deal with it. And I say, yeah it's on my way. I can stop, drop these off, no problem. It wasn't actually on my way. But I knew that if I could just get in their good graces on this first gig, it might lead to repeat work. So I drove to the other side of town, dropped these gift baskets off. A couple weeks later, I get a call from them for another gig, and there you go. I have two regular clients. Now I'm too scared to quit the restaurant at this point, so instead I just become a really bad employee, and anytime a freelance gig comes up, I just drop out and say, hey I can't show up tonight, sorry. But pretty soon, I got to the point where it just didn't make sense for me to work there anymore. I was getting regular calls from one of these two clients to do a gig. Finally, about three months after this whole quest began, I was able to quit the restaurant job entirely. I pretty quickly raised my rates with both clients, eventually working my way up to $400 for the corporate client. That was kind of like my safety client. But the other client, they were a little less regular, but they had cooler projects, they had bigger budgets usually, and I was able to raise my rates there at $500 a day, sometimes $750 a day. And it was pretty feast or famine for that first year out on my own. Once I got these two regular clients, I kind of stopped looking for work, and I just got complacent. Eventually, I rectified that, found some more clients, and was able to have a more comfortable freelance lifestyle. Hope you found this helpful. Please thumbs up and subscribe. Check out my other filmmaking tips. And my cat's waking up now, so that means it's time to say good night.