Days 8-9: Three Levels of Story, Four Pillars, Shooting for the Edit — Then the Ten-Step Editing Workflow and the Top Ten Beginner Mistakes

Level one is structure - 'a distinct beginning, middle and end'. Level two is theme, the thing that pulls the viewer through: problem and solution, creation, love, good against evil, overcoming an obstacle, desire. His own default for tutorials and commercials is problem, solution, possibility - open on a relatable problem, move to the fix, close by painting what becomes possible. Level three is craft, using movement and light to imply what nobody says aloud. Beginners jump straight to three, and the result is a montage that says nothing. He is realistic about the timescale: 'don't expect to become Steven Spielberg overnight.'

Emotion is designed rather than hoped for - a real-estate walkthrough chooses its music and frames the yard and the fireplace to sell a life, not a floor plan. Relevance ties the piece to something currently in the air; his Canon R5 review worked because the camera was news that week. Relatability is why sitcoms and infomercial products land - the problem on screen is one the viewer has. And constant mystery is the retention mechanism: withhold enough that the viewer must keep watching. 'If the person watching your content can relate to what's being said... the odds of them sticking around, watching the full thing and engaging with the content increases drastically.'

Storytelling happens in three places - pre-production, the shoot, and the edit - and the middle one is where most people lose the edit they wanted. A match cut needs the same subject, action and distance across takes so the shots align. A tree-wipe needs a keyframed mask following an object across frame, which means shooting the object crossing frame. Matched motion means carrying the same movement from one shot into the next, which has to be shot that way. 'No matter how good we are at editing, the final piece just won't look polished' without that planning - and buying a transition pack will not rescue it.

The difference between documenting and directing is the whole lesson, worked through a Merrell hiking-boot commercial where every beat - the alarm, the boot-tying, the puddle stomp, the drink, the summit - was staged with a ready-set-action. Two craft rules come with it. Keep screen direction consistent, so the subject always travels the same way across frame; flip a clip horizontally in post if you have to, because inconsistent direction quietly confuses people. And match camera or subject movement across cuts to tie unrelated shots together. The payoff is not only quality: because the piece was directed, it edited in about two hours - 'the video is almost already made in your brain'. He also tells you not to be embarrassed staging something that feels cheesy, and to shoot extra angles so the edit has somewhere to hide.

A program-agnostic sequence he uses on everything: set project settings, import and organise into labelled bins, choose the music, assemble the story from A-roll, layer B-roll and graphics, add effects and transitions, colour correct and then optionally grade, sound design, quality-assure, export. Two distinctions matter inside it. Correction makes footage look correct - exposure, white balance, saturation; grading is the optional stylised pass afterwards. And step nine is a full rewatch, hunting for misspelled graphics, an over-used transition, a sync drift, a shot that never got corrected. He names the two reasons beginners never reach step ten: a newer, shinier project, or nerves about publishing.

The old workflow built colour correction by hand, stacked audio effects manually and round-tripped every graphic through After Effects. The template workflow replaces most of it, and he is candid that 'these templates honestly look better than what I would normally whip up doing all of the custom stuff within After Effects'. Six categories: motion-graphic templates, fully customisable but program-specific and called macros in Resolve; overlay assets, which are plain video files - arrows, flares, film mattes - that work anywhere and can be recoloured; animation presets that add movement to an existing element; corrective LUTs that normalise flat or log footage and creative LUTs that add a look; and full project templates where you drop your own footage into a finished build. The strategic point is staffing: any editor can drag and drop, so the work stops depending on one person's After Effects skill.

Phones are free, fast, portable and genuinely good for social and trend content; computers cost money, take longer to learn and have to be carried, and give you precision and headroom. The practical break point is not taste but footage: native phone video edits fine on a phone, while GoPro, drone, log and professional camera codecs make it lag and drop frames. His own split is honest - 99% of his content is edited on a computer in Premiere Pro because the business needs the ceiling. His advice to a beginner is to start wherever is nearest, because 'editing is editing' and the concepts transfer, and above all not to research the decision for a week: 'pick one, dive in and start practicing.'

The list works as a pre-shoot checklist: exposure wrong, frame rate wrong or mismatched, no depth, no story, bad lighting, wrong white balance, no sound design, amateur or overdone movement, frame not filled, and over-editing. Three of the items carry a specific fix. Shoot 24fps unless you actually intend to slow the footage, because 24fps cannot be slowed without stutter. For white balance, ignore the Kelvin number and adjust until whites - or skin tones - look right on the screen. And keep 80-90% of camera movement simple, because 'the best lighting and movement goes unnoticed by the audience'. The last mistake is the one he weights heaviest: transitions on every cut, everything at 100% slow motion, warp stabiliser everywhere. Most professional cuts are plain hard cuts.