What They Asked Me To Do

So Growth School basically said "Hey, take this random footage and turn it into a long form video - one fancy 4-minute YouTube thing and another one of those vertical Instagram-style videos that kids watch on their phones." Easy, right?

The Arsenal (AKA My Digital Weapons)

The Big Three:

Premiere Pro - Where I spent 90% of my life cutting clips and pretending I knew what I was doing

After Effects - For when I wanted to add those swooshy animations that make everything look professional

Photoshop - Because sometimes you just need to make a quick graphic and pray it doesn't look terrible

My AI Sidekicks:

ChatGPT - My creative brainstorming buddy who never judged my weird ideas

Claude - The friend who helped me figure out why my timeline kept crashing (spoiler: it was always my fault)

Canva - For when I needed something that looked decent in 5 minutes

How I Actually Did This Thing

Step 1: The "Oh Crap, Where Do I Start?" Phase

First, I did what any sane person does - I procrastinated by watching other people's videos for "research." Then I actually started planning what my videos would look like and gathered references like I was collecting Pokemon cards.

Step 2: Making It Look Pretty

This is where the magic happened (and by magic, I mean countless hours of:)

• Creating graphics that didn't make people's eyes bleed
• Making things move around the screen because apparently static text is boring
• Choosing music that didn't sound like elevator music
• Mixing audio so people could actually hear what was happening

Step 3: The Format Juggling Act

Here's the fun part - making the same content work for completely different audiences:

YouTube version: Had to keep people interested for a whole 4 minutes (which in internet time is basically a lifetime)

Vertical version: Quick, punchy, and designed for people with the attention span of a goldfish scrolling through their phones

The Brutal Time Breakdown

Long YouTube Video: 20 hours (yes, TWENTY)

• Most of this was me staring at the timeline wondering why that one transition looked weird

Short Vertical Video: 8-10 hours

• Turns out cramming everything into vertical format while keeping it interesting is harder than it looks

Writing This Explanation: 8 minutes

• The easiest part, honestly

What I Actually Learned

• Making Things Look Good: Spent way too much time in After Effects making text bounce around, but hey, it looked cool. Also learned that color correction can make even boring footage look cinematic.

• Sound is Everything: Nobody tells you how much time you'll spend layering different audio tracks. Got really good at making dialogue, music, and sound effects play nice together without creating chaos.
• AI is Pretty Cool: Instead of suffering alone, I had ChatGPT help me brainstorm ideas and Claude solve my technical disasters. It's like having smart friends who are available 24/7 and don't judge you for working at 2 AM.

The Real Talk

This whole thing taught me that video editing is basically problem-solving disguised as creativity.

You're constantly figuring out how to make boring footage interesting, how to tell a story that people actually want to watch, and how to make the same content work for people whether they're watching on their laptop or scrolling on their phone during lunch break.

The AI tools didn't do the work for me, but they definitely made the creative process less lonely and helped me solve problems faster. Plus, they never got tired of my questions, unlike my actual friends.

Bottom line: I survived, the videos turned out pretty decent, and I only questioned my life choices about 47 times throughout the process. I'd call that a win!