Career Retrospective Part 1: The Amateur Era 

The Amateur Era

More Coffee TV

My journey as a video professional starts in my senior year of high school, when my sister and I were tasked with creating and upkeeping a YouTube channel as a school project (yep, homeschooling is the best).

Well, technically you could say it started 6 years before that with this video I made with my siblings in 2009:

Yeah, I’m basically Michael Bay. 

Anyway, the idea with the YouTube channel was that we would do a weekly morning show and talk about random stuff. We had the intention to do comedy sketches from time to time as well. 

Our first episode… well, it’s painful to watch:

22 minutes long? Had we ever heard of editing? Oh, and you can see our beautiful lighting setup in the window reflection. 

But by episode 26, things start to improve a little. We’re using a better camera; we have a diffusion material in front of our main light (which is still the work light) and Parker Roth (AKA Fillmore), who we had on this episode, suggested putting the two can lights we had off to each side, which made the lighting look way better.

Our morning show hosting ability still sucked though. Luckily, we’d become slightly more concise, so it’s less painful (or at least not as long) to sit through. 

This was also the point where we started making new types of videos, which forced us to learn more camera setups and adapt to different situations – including my first attempt at green screen keying with Someone’s Wrong on the Internet:

Ouch. I’m not sure which is worse, the quality of the key, the terribly placed teleprompter, the audio mixing, or that hairstyle. 

We did a cover song around Christmas, which was my first time editing a multicam video:

We attempted to do twelve sketches for the twelve days of Christmas. Unfortunately, our power went out halfway through filming them, so we only finished about half of them. This was our first dive into more complex “Narrative filmmaking” type projects, and there are a couple of shots in there that I am legitimately proud of. And honestly, the one starring my dad is still funny to me:

Watching these back is an interesting experience for me. More Coffee TV and Good Morning YouTube is a lot of things: It’s a piece of my journey as a creative; it’s in doing this project that made me realize I might be lot more fulfilled in media production than I would be as an architect (which is what I had planned to be up to that point); it’s what inspired me to take a gap year to pursue videography instead of attending college – and that gap year turned into getting an entry level videographer role, which turned into a full-time career, and now here I am eight years later!

More Coffee TV is also a part of my history. It chronicles two teenagers at pivotal points in their lives, coming into their own as creatives and desperately trying to create things that are original even though they don’t know how yet. It’s a piece of my life, my story. 

What More Coffee TV is not? Quality content. 

We continued for over a year, improving our production quality little by little. It got to point though, that we started having less and less time to dedicate to it, and let’s be honest, we were no better at hosting a morning show.  

Okay, maybe a little better. 

But the biggest lynchpin in the channel and the show finally dying? I had gotten a fulltime job.  

Coming soon … Part 2: My First Videographer Job