This is my 2025 BLOG
Continued from my FB group "About" text:
April 7, 2025 - What has happened in the last four years?
In the summer of 2021, I started working as a staff assistant editor for a "Big" trailer company. This was coming out of Covid and at that very short window in time, AE's were hard to come by. i.e. I got lucky! (Sorry Zack Arnold!)
For two years, I was livin' large and lovin' life. If you call 5 plus hours (daily) of commuting and spending $1,000 in gas a month, livin' large!
However, I was doing what I loved and learning. The people I worked with were great too. (Mostly) I was progressing, albeit slowly, in learning a craft, trailer editing. And that made me happy!
But then the slowing of Hollywood production and strikes and such, hit. It was spreading and it ultimately reached the marketing side of things. Layoffs came in waves. And one of those waves took me out.
Sept, 2023 I was laid off. I was already heavily in debt. And the next 11 months of no work, caused me to have to cash out my retirement savings as well.
Desperate but still hopeful things would turn around, I got a message in July of 2024 from an old colleague, the one that got me my first reality AE gig. They were changing careers (although I didn't know that at the time) and they wanted me to take over for them on a show they were on. This show turned out to be a wonderful TLC show that I am very proud to have worked on. My post supervisor was great too. They taught me a lot, while, pretty much letting me run the show with very little "supervision" necessary.
There were some stressful times, as there are with any post production job, but I am happy doing these things.
The pay for post is actually a problem I didn't account for in my desire to find my path. My transition in careers that I took earlier in life, from warehouse/driver to IT was a much more lucrative move. IT to post is honestly, a move to a much lower plane than ever, it feels. This is a discussion I've had with other IT prefessionals who thought following this creative path was what they wanted too. It was remarked that, for example, if one comes out of school as a programmer, they don't start out in the industry getting coffee for people, they enter as a programmer. This industry has some very weird issues that should be resolved.
Nevertheless, I'm trying to concede that I am not doing this for money. I'm doing this for a creative desire and I hope to convey that to you as well. This is NOT a get rich quick scheme. Probably not a get rich, ever, scheme, actually. While, I feel there are ways to make a great income as an editor or head of post or something else industry adjacent, I don't feel like the standard is this way at all.
My goals are to learn how to tell stories via video that compel and to be able to do that professionally and at the highest levels possible. I honestly believe that editors at the top of the summit should be making $1M a film. I believe this is possible. I think there are less than 5 who probably do, though. I want to believe that there between 10-20 who do. I also want to believe that there are closer to 200 that do, through other means, editing adjacent things like teaching, creator economy, etc. I have no idea of the actual stats though.
So, back to my path. I worked for six months on the TLC show and now I am back to being unemployed. Unemployement runs out this summer and it is my hope that I will have found a job by then. Meanwhile, I am working on learning all I can.
I am enrolled in a trailer editing program and I'm taking all the roster approved classes I can, during my not working time.
I know I said this path may be the hardest thing I ever do in my life, but damn, I was hoping that it would actually be that true!