How to Master the Art of Filmmaking

Before getting started, this is the biggest film I have ever made. I mean, it's longer than a feature film. It's packed with so much insight. It took more than 400 hours of editing time and more than three months to make. So, I hope you enjoy.

Twenty years ago, I picked up my first camera. Hello, my name is Daniel Mace. Since then, I've traveled to over 100 countries, made more than 500 films, won a few awards along the way, generated more than 1 billion long-form views, and worked with some of the biggest creators on the planet. Over the past year, I've been with Mr. Beast. Behind me is what a timeline looks like from a recent video I made with him in Nepal.

In this video, I'm going to offload everything from inside my brain—every single ounce of knowledge I've learned over the past 20 years of making videos. In doing so, I'll create the most comprehensive filmmaking tutorial of all time, ever on YouTube, right now for free.

Right now, I'm going to be using this film as an example, going back two months and taking you in real time through the entire process—from how to come up with an idea for a video, turning this idea into a compelling story, preparing to shoot the video, shooting it, editing it, which will be the most extensive part of this video, making the music or selecting the right track, doing the sound design, grading, animation, and lastly, how to best upload your video to maximize views—all as a one-man band.

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Back to the video. Okay, if you're only here for the comprehensive editing part of this video, don't worry, I got you. Head to this timestamp below.

Step one: the idea. In the world of creativity, ideas are currency. The better the idea, the easier the video is to make—well, in most cases. But what are ideas, and where do they come from? When I asked Casey Neistat, one of the greatest critical thinkers and idea generators in the world, what to do if you don't have an idea, he said, "What's up, D? What you doing in here, buddy?"

"Dude, I'm just frustrated. I've got to shoot this movie, and I have absolutely no idea what to do."

"Writer's block?"

"Does that [ __ ] ever happen to you?"

"Let's have a talk. Dan, you don't have the idea, right? Zero idea? Okay, writer's block."

"Okay, so then the key to pushing through writer's block is, for me, you look at what you do have, and out of what you do have will birth the idea. That make sense?"

"Yeah, what do you have?"

It was in this moment I realized it's all dependent on what you know and, furthermore, what you can attain. For instance, I would love to make a film tomorrow about how to use fringe science to create a time travel machine so that I can go back to the moment when I saw my wife walk down the aisle for the first time and really re-experience that emotion. Impossible? Maybe one day, but tomorrow? Never.

When I ideate, I like to get a group of friends together and play a game of sorts where we have 10 seconds to say anything that comes to mind. If that idea turns into a video, that person gets compensated by whoever ends up making it.

"Committing crime on international waters with a gangster?"

"Not being able to use your tongue for there?"

I know I have weird friends, but we're all filmmakers and have a [ __ ] ton of fun. I make sure that you surround yourself with smart people—people that challenge you and your thinking, people that you can run your ideas past, and friends that will roast you when your ideas suck.

Then there's working for a client, where the idea is given to you in some shape or form, but the majority of the execution falls on your lap. It falls on your lap to make it great through utilizing the medium of film to present it to the audience.

C—no, sorry, this isn't working. Right in the beginning, clients' expectations can somewhat be a little bit unreasonable at times. But make sure that you don't ever work for experience and not for money.

Now, once you have this idea locked in, it's time to truly consider it—consider if it's worth pursuing by asking yourself the following questions:

One, can I financially afford to pull this off?

Two, if I can't afford it, is the guerrilla option dangerous or against the law? If so, just don't do it.

Three, how long will it realistically take? You have to consider time as your biggest expense. Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Four, am I advancing at the expense of someone else? This is possibly the worst mistake you can ever make.

Don't spend an entire day doing this. It'll eventually just become a set of rules that you abide by. You know, it'll take around 10 minutes. It'll take even shorter if you eat a Brew Bar.

Oh, so good! I'll put the link in the bio to buy these. So good! Oh my God, it's good!

Oh [ __ ]! I think I broke my screen. I think I've had a few too many of these for today. They're caffeinated. Watch out! Sorry about that.

Now, whether it's making a video for your YouTube channel, a short artsy film for Vimeo, a Super Bowl ad, a corporate video for a startup, or any video for that matter, pool references. This is a massive oversight by so many filmmakers. You probably pull ideas from films or ads that you've seen in the past without even knowing.

But imagine spending the time scouring the internet for two hours and building a bank of content that deals with the same subject matter within your idea. So many new ideas will spring from this—camera techniques, editing techniques, ways in which you utilize sound and music.

Yeah, trust me, just reference, reference, and over time, you'll have such a rich folder of references like mine. We will get into this later, but please make sure that you folder everything correctly because you have to be able to navigate your way through your files as quickly as possible.

I used to find myself staring blankly at the screen like my brain was rebooting when looking for something, as there were so many different file paths that I actually forgot what I was doing in the first place.

Step two: the whiteboard. A whiteboard and an idea go hand in hand. If you have a white wall or somewhere that you can paint that's white, I suggest buying Moxy Wall whiteboard paint. It essentially turns your wall into a whiteboard, or you can just buy a secondhand whiteboard like this.

Much like a detective trying to unravel a case, I'm trying to unravel an idea to find the best way in which to tell the story. There's something about the artisanal feeling of actually writing something down. I find it far less complicated than online tools that try to make it easier.

I actually learned this working at Beast. We even travel with these, which are portable stick-on whiteboards that stick onto the wall wherever you are in the world so that you can write down your thoughts while on the go.

I've put the link to both the white wall paint and portable whiteboard below—both of these are game changers. But there's a formula to the whiteboard, and I'm speaking specifically to YouTube videos here and how I ensure that every video we upload to YouTube gets at least 25 million views.

A logline. This is a simple one-liner you can constantly return to if you ever feel lost. It's a direct roadmap from idea to execution. Remember, I'm speaking to non-fiction videos here, so for the most part, they are unscripted, where spontaneous events may occur out of your control.

This is the point of a logline. This is where the logline will help guide you most, no matter what circumstances occur along the way. This will ensure that you stick to the idea.

A logline in the fictional filmmaking world, the traditional world, would be used to sell your film to pique curiosity from a financial backer or a streamer. In our case for this video, it's the full picture summed up into as few words as possible.

And here's a formula you can use to write your own logline: problem, intention to overcome the problem, obstacle to overcoming the problem, and solution.

This is me writing the logline for the video. Before I write this logline, I'm going to eat this blue bar. Give me that strength.

[ __ ] 10-second roll. I haven't yet gone to Nepal or embarked on this mission to tell the story. In essence, this is what I feel the film would encapsulate:

The problem, which is no power in this remote village, means medical care for 6,000 people is near impossible. Okay, that encapsulates immediately this severe problem.

Then the intention to overcome the problem—this is obvious, which should be to bring power to the village and to provide care and build a hospital.

The way we would tell the story is to bring power to the tip of this mountain that's 10,000 feet above sea level, and then on top of that, build the hospital to power that hospital.

It's just a more compelling way to go about telling the story, and that will come through in this logline.

Then we've got the obstacle. It's going to be difficult and harsh terrain. It's going to be tough to get there. It's very, very cold. Temperatures we've looked at are going to be like -4°C.

That is in Fahrenheit. This amount—there's a time constraint, and this is really important for telling a compelling narrative. Always adding a time constraint to this obstacle helps make the film more engaging to understand the urgency.

Then eventually, we get to the solution, but the main problem being financial backing. All of this needs to be funded in order to happen, and that's what the solution is.

It all comes back to Beast Philanthropy. With a solution, you want it to be inevitable yet surprising. So, the inevitable ending here is that we indeed power the hospital. That's why people have come—they've clicked on the video; they want to see that.

But we have to unravel other stuff along the way. Usually, what I try and do when editing these films and when filming these projects is to try and find these unsung heroes in the communities that have really gone out of their way to make a difference and provide medical care in this scenario to 16,000 people in the village.

What we found through doing research is that there is a makeshift kind of clinic in this area where there are qualified doctors that have come there, but they don't have the tools and the necessary medical equipment in order to help in severe cases.

Like, there's been a lot of miscarriages; there's been a lot of people that have had serious infections that haven't been able to get the medical care that they need.

So now, I'm going to try and sum all of this up into a simple logline. We've got all of this. This will obviously be difficult for me to carry around written. I like to have it written on a small piece of paper so I can just quickly open it up wherever I go if my phone battery dies or whatever the case may be.

So, I'm going to restrict this into as few words as possible. I've written a really long sentence now, and it's more like a paragraph, but this will now help me to use the art of reduction to get it into a more simple form.

I've managed to reduce it to 26 characters. Usually, I'd like to do 25 characters, but 26 is okay.

"In a remote Nepali village, 16,000 people lack electricity, hindering medical access. We'll battle the harsh terrain, power the village, construct the hospital, and empower locals."

Now that I've got this, I have a compass—a metaphorical compass to follow when making this film.

The title and thumbnail. So, once you have the logline waxed, you have to start thinking about the title and the thumbnail immediately—yes, this early in the game—because the way that the thumbnail correlates with the title, which correlates with the first line in the film, all affects your CTR, which is your click-through rate.

This is literally so important. It will make the difference between getting 10,000 views, 100,000 views, a million views, 10 million views, and so on. You can use subtle clickbait—that's the world we kind of live in on YouTube right now—but just make sure that this is solely emphasizing what your video is about.

Obviously, if you make something ridiculous that the video is just not about, the audience is going to get pissed off, and they're probably going to unsubscribe.

Here's a quick five-step phase of how we developed the thumbnail for the video. I decided to title it "We Powered a [Music] Mountain."

Now, once you have this down, it's time to move on to the hook. When dealing with non-fiction films, unscripted films like these, it is impossible to write a script in its entirety before shooting because I don't yet know the nuance or the environment that we're going to be shooting in.

However, I always try to have a strong opening line written up front. Here's me coming up with the opening line for this video.

The key to a good hook is to immediately assure the audience that what they've clicked on is the video that they're about to see. The thumbnail that you've shown them is now the journey—the video that they are about to watch.

But at the same time, you have to pique curiosity. So, if the title is "We Power a Mountain," the audience already knows what we're going to do. We need to hook them; we need to give them a reason to care right up front, but also assure them that we are indeed going to be powering a mountain.

However, we used hyperbole with this title because we only powered just the top of the mountain. We powered a hospital at the top of the mountain, and that's what we're going to try and unravel in this opening line.

In this one line, using a one-liner like this wouldn't really work for this video: "One week ago, this mountain looked like this."

Because, as I said, the whole mountain obviously didn't change. But if we did light up an entire mountain, if we did power the entirety of the mountain, this would be a great opening line to have—juxtaposing what it did look like and what it looks like now.

Then the audience kind of wants to understand what happened in the middle. This is one of a whole bunch of different formulas.

Okay, I'm going to try and do this in one hour. [Music] Focused. So, we're going to go from problem to an interesting fact or new insight, and then what the mission is.

This takes a long [Music] time. Okay, we on to something. We on to something. We on to something.

This, after two hours, I finally came up with a hook that I think would work: "Ten days ago, this hospital on top of a literal mountain in Nepal looked like this."

What'll be really interesting is to go forward around five weeks and see if this line has changed at all. Spoiler: it does.

This happens quite a lot when Jimmy and I are shooting. We go back and forth, and we try different lines, but they all are around the same idea.

Make sure you take a picture of this whiteboard and keep it on your phone. You don't know who's going to come along and wipe it off.

Now that you have the idea, the logline, the title, and thumbnail, it's time to develop the story.

Step three: the story. Entertainment doesn't just mean to make someone laugh or feel joy; it could also mean to make them cry. The point is to evoke an emotion.

So then, what is storytelling? There will be 40 different Google definitions as to what storytelling is, but I define it as the process of guiding an audience through a sequence of events that lead to an outcome that can either be inevitable or surprising—or even better, both.

The purpose here is to transform human behavior through utilizing impact communication and then persuasion. You have the ability, with a really powerful story, to impact the way people think and, furthermore, behave.

Think of any video right now—not one you watched yesterday or today. Think of any film, a theatrical film, a video on YouTube.

Okay, I'm going to give you three seconds to think here: 3, 2, 1.

And the reason you're remembering this film is because it actually had an impact on the way that you think. It could have had an impact on the way that you behave. It changed you somehow.

This isn't just me talking [ __ ]—this was actually tested, probably by a neurologist, where he measured audiences' oxytocin levels in the blood.

Oxytocin acts as a chemical messenger and has an important role in many human behaviors, including recognition, trust, romantic attachment, and bonding. As a result, oxytocin has been called the love hormone or cuddle chemical.

Paul Zak is a neurologist, and his team designed an experiment in which subjects watched either a video of an emotional story about cancer or a basic descriptive one.

The results showed that those who watched the emotional story had a 47% increase in oxytocin and gave more to cancer charity. Storytelling made people more trusting and generous.

In more tests, Zak found that people who watched public service announcements gave 261% more money to charity when their oxytocin levels went up. Zak provided the scientific basis for what storytellers have known for a long time: stories help people pay attention and build trust.

A key part of effective bridge building is the long-lasting effects of stories. It's the transformation that occurs from the changes in the brain. Stories can create lasting effects because we remember stories better than individual facts.

Stories can be recalled and used to influence people even after a long time has passed. I learned all of this by reading a book by Kindra Hall called "Stories That Stick."

Look, if you're not reading non-fiction or listening to podcasts, you're just not expanding your brain. Books are the cheapest form of knowledge.

And before any excuses start, anyone that says that they don't have the time to read is just lying to themselves. It takes the average person just over eight hours to read a 300-page book.

And if you want to read a book a week like I do, it's more or less one and a half hours of reading time per day, and that's excluding the weekends.

This is the same amount of time—or actually far less time—that I would spend, or I used to spend, watching Netflix when I got home from work.

And yeah, being dyslexic, I'm still able to finish a book from beginning to end every week. If you're interested in reading my top 10 favorite books on storytelling, I've put them in the link below.

Videos are so powerful that they have the ability to start fan cults, fashion trends, jargons, memes. They connect you to something far bigger than yourself, and that's why you sometimes feel the urge to click like, to comment, or to share—like you're going to do with this video.

Please share it, like it, and comment. Please! They can make you more sympathetic towards a tragic event that's happened somewhere else in the world that has nothing to do with you, or a rare illness or mental health condition.

Stories can and will transform people to become volunteers, or like we see on the Beast Philanthropy Channel, when the video evokes more emotion, the more the audience tends to donate to that cause.

Or stories can just purely help you escape for that moment in time. But the more powerful that entertainment, that captivation that you feel, the longer-lasting these effects of transformation will be.

But how do you tell a story? Not just any story—a great story. A story so great that it will be told for years to come. You need four parts:

One, identifiable characters.

Two, a significant moment or an event.

Three, authentic emotion.

And four, specifics.

Then you need to use the art of reduction to break this down into three simple acts. Hemingway said that writing is architecture, not interior design.

He also called this the iceberg, which was later coined the theory of omission. This is to omit not the unnecessary from the audience, but to intentionally do so through reductionism, which simplifies the story but also layers it to leave parts for the audience's interpretation.

To break this down into a more new-age sort of YouTube way of writing, I've broken it down into three simple acts. We could call this a hybrid of sorts:

One is impact or attention.

Two is influence, which is conversation.

Three is persuasion or transformation.

Do not use ChatGPT ever, ever, ever to write a story. I mean, you can use it for other stuff, like if you want to write something nice on Mother's Day, but don't use ChatGPT to write your film for you.

It should be flawed; it should be almost intentionally flawed. It makes it human. Make your films human. Don't use AI in order to do so.

You can use AI to help amplify the visuals. I don't know; I'm just so anti-utilizing AI tools to write something. Just write what you know.

But what's really important to mention here is never assume that you know it all or that you're ever going to master the art of storytelling. Knowing all prevents thinking.

You need to constantly be thinking; you need to constantly be innovating. Bringing this back to how I write a story for my films is that all I do is write a simple two-pager—just two pages that focus on these different acts.

I don't go heavily into specifics, as to my point earlier—knowing or assuming or pre-thinking. In this case, you need to be malleable; you need to be able to adapt to certain scenarios.

What if your scene was supposed to be done in broad daylight, and now it's pouring with rain? You need to be able to adapt to this, and sometimes it's serendipitous. It actually makes the scene better because you got to seek out the nuance, and that's why the script for the most part is written in post-production, which I'm going to take you through later.

Okay, time for another Brew Bar, and then to the next. Jeez, can't get enough of these. Link to buy in the description.

Okay, time for the next phase: step four—planning your shoot. The first part about the preparation phase is to understand the budget.

Now, when looking at budget, don't think that the bigger the budget, the better the film. Bigger budgets actually make it harder to make films. I know it sounds ridiculous.

When you have a smaller budget, there's less pressure. There's usually less people involved. You have the ability to think outside the box a lot more.

I think back to a lot of the ads and the films that I've made that have been super big budget, and there's been a lot of people talking, a lot of people saying things, so much gear, so many options, and it removes this internal artist.

It removes the ability to be able to think outside the box and think with just the tools that you have. I once made a film during COVID out of a [Music] brick, because that's all that was there, and I needed to make films.

Oh, another example is the very first film—the very first serious film that I made called "Gift." I had a budget of $350 that I made because I used to sell jams out of the trunk of my car.

Yeah, I saved up enough money, and I had $350. I made this film, and then that film went on to win a Young Director's Award at Cannes and a few other awards.

And I think back to it, and if I had that idea and then somebody had to give me a lot of budget for that film back then, it would have ruined the idea.

Yeah, just don't get stuck in this mindset that big budget equals easier films. That's not hard work.

But it's really, really important to understand what the budget is because those are where your parameters are. That's kind of where you can work within that space.

For every philanthropy film I make for Beast, there's a fixed budget. And because it's philanthropy, the budget isn't very high, but at least I know every single time what the budget is.

These films do become easier to make because I know the parameters. I understand what I can and what I can't do, as well as Mr. Beast is super generous.

If we do need something extra here or there, and it does make sense within the film, we do increase the budget.

Next is research. Researching the country, culture, and people, and the laws of the place you will be shooting is extremely important.

When traveling around the world, I want to be respectful of other people's cultures, traditions, and ideologies. This allows me to film as much of the culture as I can in the most respectful way possible.

Another really good tip of advice is to always couple up with the local. Make sure you take some of your budget and you're able to pay this person to be able to take you around, teach you these things about their culture, as well as they will help you navigate your way through wherever you are and get the shots that you desire.

They'll take you to these places you didn't even know existed. What I found is, you know, Google only gives you so much, and locals truly understand.

Think about your own town or what you know from micro-travel around your city—how you understand it. This will also keep you out of danger and make sure that you don't go into dangerous areas.

I find this highly valuable when creating music from the cultures and kind of veering off from the theme and going and shooting B-roll, but I'll speak to that later in the shooting phase of this tutorial.

You also need to understand the legalities around filming people in public and using their face in your YouTube videos. Every person that features in a Beast Philanthropy video has to sign a cast release form, meaning that they've given you full permission to be in your video.

Abiding by the local laws wherever you are in the world, as well as abiding by the laws of YouTube, is a must.

Next, shooting schedule. This sometimes differs, but I like to cap the shooting days to three days, with the fourth day being a contingency day.

Contingency meaning if we just couldn't get what we needed to get on that third day or second day, we do have one more day to be able to capture this footage.

If we don't use this contingency day, it's great because I can use it to travel around and get extra footage, capture music, raw sounds, capture raw parts of the culture, and just understand the area that I'm in so much better because I'll be boots on the ground in that area.

I'm not just focusing on the story, but I'm also focusing on the culture. This will help so much in post-production.

Having three shooting days and an extra day also helps with the shot list because technically we could shoot these films within two days, but now the shot list can be more interchangeable.

Remember, we're making non-fiction films here. We're not stuck to doing ten shots a day, and we're not with hundreds of people on set. We have to be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

Step five: music. I believe that music makes up around 40% of the film. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it really does—the emotion, everything you can control.

Let me explain. This is my studio. This is where I like to make music. If you're not a musician and you're not into making music or scoring for films, then just skip past this section.

You can utilize multiple online sites to download great music. If a stock library wanted this resp from me, I would have shouted you out here, but I'm not going to. I'm joking; I'm remaining non-biased.

Okay, trust me when I tell you the right track will make your film. There are so many moments where in a Beast Philanthropy film, it's the exact same scene with a different track. It just doesn't feel right.

Then we come back to the drawing board, and it's like, "Okay," and we feel something, and then when that plays out, like, the whole film changes—the whole emotion. It's [ __ ] incredible.

This forced door to turn to TikTok for help. The very first day I posted, I did not get any views at all. It took one song, and that small video helped me to have my first follower, which I moved from one to close to 4.5 million.

This, on its own, is an incredible feat, especially without any access to electricity or reliable cell reception.

Now that I've got an understanding of the story and the emotion, and like what I want the emotion to be, I start to write music. In a perfect world, I can go and shoot with a few finished soundtracks.

That way, I can obsess a little bit more. We do a lot of traveling, and we unass buses and trains and planes and whatever, and I can put on my headphones and I can listen to the music, and I can obsess a little bit more about the idea.

It brings me back to the logline, and it sort of starts to connect everything. It also helps with shooting toward the edit.

Don't do this with stock music. We'll speak about stock music later. What I find about stock music is that it's something that should happen in post.

Stock music will alter your thinking around the way in which you want to shoot your film. Somebody else has made it; you've come across it, and then your brain starts to go, "Oh, maybe I should shoot it like this," because there's a nuance that I found in this track, and that's dangerous.

If you have the ability to be able to score music and come up with the melody yourself, you're creating that melody around the original idea.

I do this for two reasons: one is to be able to help me connect to the original idea, and another is because what I do—and I'll show you more in depth when shooting the film—is utilizing diegetic sounds.

Diegetic sounds are sounds that happen in front of the frame, technically. Okay, with this pencil, if I buy the pencil, it's a pen.

I'm losing it. Oh, I need another Brew Bar. Oh, they like magic; they just fly out of nowhere.

This is a diegetic sound, and then a non-diegetic is a sound that will happen outside of the frame. So, I could add an ambient sound outside here to position us next to a train station.

You know, it would alter the way in which the audience perceives where the studio is. That's diegetic. Diegetic happens in front of the frame.

So what I try and do is write some form of melody, keep it very, very loose, and then go and shoot sounds that instruments make in those locations and then recreate the track from those objects or instruments within whatever culture it is that we're in.

Because it helps the audience feel more connected to the film. It helps the audience feel as if they were there, and that's really important.

I'll show you an example here now—an anthem made from all of us. For me, you can do as you can see, the process of stuff is a lot easier.

Like, anything you want to do with percussion, like that's a percussive sound, you know? But finding melody is difficult.

That's why I also try to create a melody beforehand and then back shoot that. You could go to a musician there, and you could play them your melody and you could say, "Could you transpose this in a sense culturally to what would make sense in your environment?"

Oh, it just makes it easier. Music also is a language that's spoken universally, so I can just play a piece of music, and someone who can't speak English—and I obviously can't reciprocate in their language—I can play music to them through my phone, and they understand.

We got to—and then, you know, there's nothing more pure than being able to play music with somebody else when you can't speak the same language. It's a really beautiful feeling.

So yeah, I'm just going to try and build the motif and then the center track of the film. The film will move around one track that has a similar motif throughout that we can keep returning to.

What you kind of want to do is tease the audience with this, and then you want to go into the resolve, and that's where the kind of four chords come in.

The four chords are something that you return to; they're nostalgic. They kind of remind you of something that you've heard before, even though it may sound different, and you may be playing an octave up, or you may have added an inversion, or you've transposed it somehow.

For Beast Philanthropy, I like to return to these four. For example, this is a piece from a previous [Music] film.

When we were speaking about oxytocin earlier, that's what it does. It pre-releases that feeling; it reminds you of that one time you were in love or you watched something that was beautiful that made you feel special.

It's nostalgic; it's melancholic. The four chords can go anywhere.

In saying that, we're going to try something here. Then what I do is we'll come up with something, record it, possibly write it. If it is too complicated, then we'll take this recording, we'll go to Jason, and Jason is who puts it all together.

He knows how to use all the cool tools and stuff. Yeah, he just makes it beautiful.

I sit around here and just like plinky [Music] plunk me. [Applause] [Music] [Music] Cool! I'll just do a voice recording.

Yeah, this is a progression that I think works. Same four chords. You're going to hate me for it. [Music]

But in the predictables [Music]—oh, [ __ ]! You get it, though. Super rough. Let me know when I can come around, and let's turn that into a track.

Let's go! Before we hit to Jason, I just want to touch on a few more things about music. What I'll get into in the edit is showcase how to use music correctly.

Okay, let me just phone Jason because we're running out of time, and this video is taking forever to make.

Okay, well, he didn't answer. Jason just got back to me. It's a little bit late; it's 7:30 p.m., but we got to go to his studio now and make the music.

[Music] What's up, R? See, R, it's been a minute. This is where Jason takes over completely. I'm just going to sit here and [Music] [Applause] observe.

It's 1:00 a.m. Jason has, as always, carried the entire workload of the music.

Okay, here it [Music] goes. [Music] Hit work so well in the film. That's H's done. Back to the office.

Step six: the shoot. This is what I pack for a Beast Philanthropy shoot: small camera, lens, bigger lens, even bigger lens, lens adapter, ND filter, a drive, another drive, and another drive, sound gear, more sound gear, microphone, batteries, more batteries, and some more batteries, charging cube, DV cam, headphones, flashlight, tube light, pink, blue, and black gaff tape, power bank, another power bank, keyboard, obviously Brew Bars, lots of Brew Bars, action cam, empty card holder, full card holder, hyperdrive, hyperdrive, lepo mic, notebook, gorilla pod, drone controller, Pelican case, and backpack.

And then, obviously, clothes. Then there's a few items that have literally saved the day, that have saved the shot, that you should definitely pack in your bag. They're non-expensive items, but make sure that you have these at all times.

One is gaff tape. Don't pack this in your carry-on luggage; they will take it away. It's happened to me a few times—far too many times.

The other is a multi-tool. Do not pack this in your overhead luggage either; they will remove it. Universal plugs—I mean, self-explanatory. You need power, and if you don't have power, a power bank.

This one's got lots of little things that you can plug into. It's a cool one. You should pack this in your overhead luggage. If it's in the other bag, they will remove it because it's like a big battery thing, and they don't like it.

A small light is also great. Jesus, in the dark, this can help in Nepal. There's going to be no electricity for most of the time, and a light like this that can be powered by battery is so valuable.

Cable ties—definitely do not pack this in your overhead luggage. This will create a lot of concern. Cable ties can do anything, much like gaff tape.

And a multi-plug with a long extension cord. This is for setting up what you call a gear bay. As soon as I arrive, I make sure that everything is neatly packed.

I'm very finicky when it comes to that sort of thing to make sure that I've got all my items lined out. This can help you at the end of the day to kind of look at an inventory list and make sure that you haven't lost anything.

And make sure that your batteries are always charged. Now let me show you how I set up a gear bay.

I need to make it abundantly clear that I'm not in Nepal right now—the night before a shoot—because let me show you what the Nepal setup looked like.

That is not the normal way to set up a gear bay at all. We had zero electricity, zero power. I'm going to use this as an example where I've got electricity in a hotel room right now.

It's the night before I'm shooting in Mexico. Even though I've been traveling for 32 hours straight, I have to shoot tomorrow. So no matter how tired I am, even though I can go again, I'm going to do this tomorrow.

I make sure I set up my gear bay the night before. Right now, I'm not too concerned about the lenses and the camera buddies—mainly batteries. Always batteries first.

Now what you want to do is make sure that you have enough distance between this [ __ ] so not everything's on top of one another.

Now that my gear station's all organized, it's time to take a look at my camera and how I set it up for every shoot day. First, I make sure that all my cameras are set to the correct date, time, and format.

These are countries that use PAL, and these use NTSC. This will alter your shooting settings as well as your frame rates—PAL being 25 frames per second and NTSC being 24 or 23976.

But also, if your camera allows for it, you can get 120 frames per second over 100 FPS that you would get on PAL, giving you that extra bit of slow motion.

I shoot everything at 60 FPS standard and then move over to 120 when needed, as you never know when you might need to slow something down—a moment of joy, a moment of sadness, etc.

I make sure that my camera is set to shoot in Sony S-Log 3. This is the log picture profile on my camera and will allow me to retain as much detail as possible in the shot.

No matter what camera you shoot on, if it does have the option to shoot log, I would suggest shooting in that setting, as this will give you more latitude to grade in post.

Essentially, it retains more detail and gives you more maneuverability with color. I also make sure to set the file naming convention in every camera I'm shooting on to include the date as well as the sequence number so that no files are duplicated, as this would cause them to link incorrectly while editing.

This is a very common mistake. You probably know most of this, but these are my shooting preferences in order to make things look more cinematic.

Firstly, I shoot on the most shallow depth of field possible. That obviously goes with how fast your lens is. These lenses go to 2.8.

The trick is, obviously, in broad daylight, there's too much light, and that's where an ND filter comes into play. Generally, NDs work in 3, 6, and 9. That's one stop, two stops, or three stops.

I like to use a variable ND filter, but if you overcompensate and go beyond three stops, you're going to start getting crosshairs.

Also, remember that if you're fully zoomed out, you are going to get vignetting, so you are going to have to crop in slightly in post.

The shutter speed then is an interesting one. There are many different ways you can go about this. If you want to kind of sit in the middle and make sure that your image is sharp, but it's not too sharp, but it's also not too slow, always make sure that your shutter speed is double the speed of your frame rate.

So if you're shooting 60 frames per second, make sure that you're shooting 1 over 120. And if you're shooting 120 frames per second, make sure you're shooting 240 to make color grading much less of a nightmare.

Make sure that you set your white balance. Your white balance should be consistent throughout all your cameras.

So this camera that's shooting me right now is compensating for this light, or else I'll just be orange. I'll be an orange person.

Here, for example, I'm going to change the white balance to make it warmer, and I'm going to change the white balance to make it colder.

At standard, 5,600 is known as daylight, and 3,200 is known as night. These numbers work in what's called Kelvin—3,200 Kelvin, 5,600 Kelvin.

Every camera has a native ISO. The reason I don't like red cameras is because they just can't shoot in low light. If you like red cameras, good for you. I like Sonys.

The reason I love Sony is they're so good in low light. I'm speaking to ISO here—the native ISO. With the Sony cameras I shoot on, the native ISO is 640 and 12,800.

Make sure that you know what the native ISO on your camera is so that you don't get gain all over the place in your footage. It's just terrible.

I always make sure I have three formatted SSDs. The reason I use three SSDs is for just extra precaution. I had a situation recently with a really shady company—the shittiest hard drive you can ever come across—because it deleted and formatted everything.

And that company's name is SanDisk. Yes, you, SanDisk! I knew I was going to have to shoot this here, so I brought this with as a prop just to show how much I hate it.

Look, okay, okay, one thing I'll give you, SanDisk, is they're pretty rugged, but they format all the time. Now, because of the fear that's been so deeply embedded within me from losing footage, I make sure that I daisy-chain my drives.

It just means plug them all in at the same time so the footage trickles between one to the next to the next. I use a program called Hedge to do this. I'll link it below, obviously.

Then all my files are the same across all my drives, but then I've got three different drives, and I can put them in three different places when I fly back home.

In case the plane crashes, I know, well, then all the footage will be gone. But if one of my bags breaks and goes missing with one drive, that's okay.

If I get stolen or go missing, that's also okay. Yeah, then if the other bag goes missing, well, then the project just wasn't supposed to happen.

Yeah, that's enough about hard drives. Now, back to my office a day before I fly to [Music] Nepal.

Okay, now with everything prepped, let me tell you how I actually go about shooting a Beast Philanthropy video.

Okay, first, to track everything throughout the day, I create edit logs. This is a document where I write everything down—every key moment from the shoot—and then tag certain files, such as interviews or B-rolls.

This is extremely handy whenever I need to refer back to what I shot. This is from the film in Colombia, and it's amazing to go through. I keep all these edit logs.

Yeah, these are really special to me. I've got a whole bunch of different books that I keep, and I label everything. It's just so important for post-production.

The narrative for all the Beast Philanthropy videos comes from the interviews. They drive the story forward and allow me to extract the subject matter needed to make the film emotive, as well as find out more about the project at hand through the subject's point of view.

A way to make sure that the audience understands that this is a conversation happening between one person and another and not that character to the camera. They never stare into the lens.

I've created an X out of gaff tape, and the character looks at that. Not in here. Eyeline is so important. If this seems close to the camera, and you may think that it looks like they're looking there, trust me, this actually looks pretty far off of camera.

The only people that look directly into the lens are Jimmy and Darren because they are the main narrators of the story. They are speaking to the audience.

I also shoot two angles—one from the front and one from the side. This helps with cutting just in case there is a stumble with words or a lot of "ums" and "ahs."

Then, after the interview, I like to shoot hands, eyes—those kinds of moments that I can push into. So, in case there are fumbles with what the person is saying, I then also record the sound externally with lav mics and internally on the camera.

So, this goes without saying—you definitely know this—but you don't need a clapperboard. But always just clap in before the interview to make sure that the two cameras sync as well as the mouth to the lav mics.

Now that I've spoken about shooting the two-camera kind of more setup interviews, this is how I go about shooting the film—the actual substance, the subject matter.

These are my favorite things to do through the interview process. You'll definitely find out about other characters within the community, so about going and finding out more about these characters and hopefully being able to interview them and really feel their [Music] environment.

And then once you have this, you'll have the ability to go back and kind of shot list or quickly on your phone or right then and there know what B-roll shots to get that will best amplify the moments.

Diegetic sounds—going out and hunting for music and hunting for sound and hunting for culture and dance and rhythm and music. I've probably said music twice there because it's so important for me.

Then these match cuts, which have to be on a tripod. There's nothing worse than match cuts and the ones this way and that, and then you're sitting in post and you're trying to fix them all.

Match cuts are used for multiple reasons. I use them to showcase scale, so I use them with people's faces, match cutting through a whole bunch of faces, or to showcase a building before it was built and when it was built, or before it was restored and when it was restored.

Also, multiple angles of things just add more context. It's what's known as the mise-en-scène. It gives you the environment that you are in.

Time lapses can sometimes become a little bit redundant, but they're great. They're great to showcase and kind of merge time and space and kind of progress you into the next day really quickly.

Another use of time lapses is also to showcase scales. If we're doing a project where an environment is getting filled by thousands of people, we can either do match cuts, like I spoke about before—empty to now full—or quickly people filling a space.

Then, with every character, I like to do front follows and back follows. I shoot this at around 24 to 28 mm, and I also try and shoot this either in morning light or evening light.

It's so great to get a little peak of sun, so you kind of look at where the shadow line is and then know where to get the peak of light to come out. You can do this from a lower angle and then also do it eye-to-eye level.

Shoot this at a higher frame rate as well as get that character within the environment that makes sense to what they are saying.

To look around, look down if it's a concerning moment. Make sure that they look concerned. If it's a moment of joy, make sure that they look happy. Get them to look up in each direction.

Remember, again, it's an unscripted film. We don't know what we're going to have to use in post, so overshoot here. Make sure that you overcompensate.

With Beast Philanthropy films, we deal with pretty harsh subject matter, and this is a difficult thing. You know, there's a line that you can cross, and we don't want to cross the line, but you also need to showcase these harsh realities.

For example, if there's an area that doesn't have access to running water, you can use iconography like a tap that just has one droplet of water coming out.

Then there is certain subject matter that's just tough to watch, and you have to consider the audience here. This is where animation is a great tool—a great way of being able to describe this in a non-gruesome sense.

Then, if I have the budget, I use a licensed drone pilot to just get some drone shots of the area. Again, I'm not a massive fan of too many drone shots, but this does help again with the mise-en-scène—the environment, showcasing where it is, as well as, you know, there can be some quick and clever cuts with this, as well as match cuts from above, from the side, being able to access areas that you wouldn't be able to access.

I'm fine with using a drone. I hate a gimbal. Never—I, you know, you do you. Shoot with the gimbal; that's just not for me.

The reason for this is because the gimbal gets misused. The gimbal now, for some reason, people want to just shoot stable shots of everything—moving shots, moving through doors, moving out of doors.

For instance, when someone's running, you don't want to see a smooth shot of someone running. You want to feel the running. You want to run beside them.

Remember, we are sitting in non-fiction films here. We're sitting in YouTube. This is the reality of what it is. Be shaky; it's totally cool. It's unexpected. It sits outside of what's become now the norm—these stable, shitty shots.

Then there are comedic bits, which I'll show you an example from our recent film in Mexico. We're walking through the park; we just found a mariachi band, and it's always been a dream of Darren to join a mariachi band.

So hopefully, I can make this dream come true. "Sorry, and my friend over there, he wants to join the band."

"Okay, we—"

"You ahead!" [Music]

"I think we have to shut this down. This is terrible."

"That was one of the greatest experiences of my life."

That shows you how boring Darren's life is.

These help make these videos less fatiguing, so when watching it, because it's such emotive subject matter, you get the audience to a point, and we want tears, and we want people to feel that feeling.

Then you want to kind of break that feeling for a little bit and give them some humor—give them something to enjoy.

I believe that all the dogs are scared of Darren because every time he tries to feed a dog, they run away.

Not every dog. Look at that one. Dogs like [Music] me.

As well as this also helps with what I spoke about earlier—having returning characters within the video that help the audience build a relationship with either it's Jimmy, Darren, or myself within these moments that have this friendship and this bond.

You kind of start to understand the dynamic between the two or three people. Then also, you have to consider your other social platforms as well.

In that environment, also be vigilant for things that could work for a YouTube short or a TikTok video. For instance, when we were in Thailand and we built a dog shelter, there was a small section of that of a dog named Goya that had the ability to run for the first time because we provided Goya with a wheelchair for her back legs.

This made an exceptional short-form piece of content.

And lastly, what I've spoken about—the obvious—is the unknown. There's probably four other things here that I just don't know what I'm going to end up shooting.

And that's if I think again, I'm getting stuck in this notion of I should only be shooting this. I miss out on all of this, and that's through speaking to locals and constantly being on the hunt for something—a more rich story, something that's going to drive you deeper.

So make sure you always have your camera. I have this little side small camera that I like to use that I can whip out at any point and kind of get those shots.

Sometimes an iPhone works as well. It doesn't matter cinematically if it doesn't match. If it advances the story, that's all that matters.

Lastly, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever film somebody without their knowledge that you're filming them.

We've had cases of this. I've had cases of this of people filming me. It's terrible. People do this weirdly. I have no idea. Maybe they want to catch you out saying something wrong or misuse a piece of information or dox you somehow.

There's nothing more disrespectful than me having people film me like that and people from my team like that. Just don't do it, please.

Just always make sure that you're telling someone, "Hey, do you mind if I shoot this?" and you roll it. Even if it's you shooting this way, make sure the people that are speaking here understand that you're rolling.

You're possibly rolling sound. This may be people speaking about important things that are private to them. It could be stuff about business. Just make sure that people understand that you are shooting.

Now, time to pack a [ __ ] I need shoes.

Yeah, all righty, off to Nepal. Let's do this!

After three flights and 28 hours of travel, we finally arrived in Kathmandu. But we still had to jump onto that thing—that's a transport—which is a really uncomfortable 9.5-hour, very rickety and bumpy ride all the way to the top of a 9,000-foot mountain.

We even drove past the Milky Mirror Wall, which is filled with thousands and thousands of mirrors. Because of this really long drive, Darren, who is the executive director of Beast Philanthropy, got to sit down and talk about what goes into the shooting part of the process.

After all the planning has been done, the truth of the matter is that this is probably the most difficult and most demanding part of the whole process.

By the time we're ready to go to bed at 3 or 4:00 in the morning, and we'll do this days in a row, I don't want to make it sound like it's terrible. It's an incredible adventure. Every single shoot is different, but they're incredibly tiring and grueling.

Things don't always go the way that we plan. Darren and I fight about the concept all the time.

"Dan and I fight about everything all the time."

I just said that—not the concept.

I'm talking—are you doing it again?

In all honesty, none of this would have happened without Jimmy. He has the rock behind everything that we are doing over here.

The fact that he has given us this platform to do this and the significant amount of money that he invests in everything that we are doing is something I'll never, ever be able to express to him what it means.

And then, as we drove on down, around, and rambled for hours, as he usually does, until he finally said something worth noting.

When we finished the project planning and everything, that's when we head on location and start planning our shoot with Jimmy.

Here's a quick example of how I shot Jimmy for the video we made in Mexico for Operation Smile. While I waited for Jimmy to arrive, I went through the printed version of the script to make sure that everything was perfect.

I always start off by getting B-roll shots of Jimmy walking through the field. Even though Jimmy is highly camera trained, I like to do B-roll shots first.

First, I share these kind of off-camera conversations and some laughs, which really helps when he's talking to the camera.

Next, I shot all of Jimmy's lines to camera. "Mexico, Operation Smile." I put so much emphasis on making sure that Jimmy's cadence is correct.

We go back and forth a lot just to make sure that this comes across the right way.

"One of these patients is Emanuel."

"Am I happy or sad or just neutral?"

"Yeah, you're neutral."

The reason I have to help guide Jimmy's lines to camera and video is because he has not yet seen the edit and somewhat is going into this completely blind.

I really do appreciate the trust he gives me to direct him with this. It's during the reviews of the edit that he does sometimes request VO changes, but very rarely does he request changes to the lines he delivers directly to the camera.

Even though I script these lines, Jimmy uses it very much as a guide, which helps him understand the story, and then he shapes the lines to make them more his own.

"Here, let me do one like that. That's a little shorter. You don't have to use it."

"I see."

"All right, for hundreds of thousands of kids in South Africa, the only thing standing between them and an education is a simple pair of shoes."

"Let me explain."

What seems like a small nuance is actually massive. This makes a huge difference in the edit.

It was time for patient number 99.

"He did it! Just look at the relief on his face."

"Like that?"

"Or perfect."

"He did it! Just look at the relief on his face."

"Perfect! That's amazing!"

"He did it! Just look at the relief on his face."

"He did it! Just look at the relief on his face."

Okay, with all that being said, back to Nepal. We're getting close to the location as the bus finally pulled up to its last stop.

The extreme altitude made it really cold, but we soon found out we weren't even there yet.

Darren says it's a beautiful walk. I say it's a treacherous walk. We still had to walk 5 km with just 3 mil to get to the village until we finally arrived in Kagan—one of the most beautiful villages in rural Nepal.

For the next four days, we were graciously hosted by an incredible Nepali family.

"Welcome to my house!"

"Thank you!"

"Welcome!"

"Thank you!"

But there was a slight problem. There were two beds and three of us, and from past experiences, Darren and I knew that I needed a good night's rest.

So how are we going to do this?

"Boy, do what you know."

Well, luckily, our neighbor was kind enough to offer Darren his own room.

And just before the sun was starting to set, I got to profess my love for Darren.

"That's supposed to be a heart."

"I love [Music]."

"You're good! You're good! You got this!"

This is Beast Philanthropy hair and makeup, and now we have to walk the whole way to the top of that thing up there to meet the community.

The walk there was tougher than expected. Thankfully, we made it in one piece, even though it was the first night.

I felt extremely welcomed by the community.

[Applause]

And instead of immediately filming, I got the opportunity to immerse myself in the culture.

Make sure you create these strong bonds with people—with the locals.

"It's cold as [ __ ]!"

We then headed home to get a good night's rest before the first day of shooting.

That's it from my side. It got really hectic there.

The next morning, with no time to waste, I grabbed my camera and headed out to the village to start shooting.

This is my movement order or shot list for the first day of shooting. I started out by going to the neighboring family and then filming all of these details around me.

Notice how I'm non-invasively directing the people that I'm filming. This helps me ensure that I always capture the moment that I'm looking for.

And when filming a conversation like this, it's important to understand when to point the camera at the person speaking and then when to pan over and point the camera at the person listening.

This obviously comes with skill and practice, and just doing it a lot, it will eventually become instinctual to predict what's going to happen next.

I then stumbled across this man playing the guitar because it's raw sounds like these that I can more easily turn into a track at a later stage.

Darren and I then got a lift in this pickup truck to the hospital. Once we arrived, I started off by getting the opening shots.

I like to call these plinky-plunk match cuts. These are great for showcasing before and afters. It's just so impactful to see where a building started and where it's ended.

Then I like to dive into the interviews. Just like when shooting Jimmy, I always ensure that the subject feels comfortable.

This isn't them speaking to a camera; this is rather them speaking to you and you having this conversation.

Watch this answer from Melissa as she reflects on her personal journey with her organization, the Green Program.

"And when I think about myself at 11 or 19 starting this, I just—I don't think I could have ever dreamed that we would be bringing people around the world who care so deeply and are doing such amazing work and just bring so much love and empathy and kindness to the work that they do.

I'm very lucky, very, very grateful to be here with all these amazing people. This is why you guys are so good at what you do."

And this is how I ask the question: "Tell me how you feel literally when you wake up in the morning here and you look over the valley, you see this hospital, and you realize that that's because of your work. You know you made this thing happen."

Lots of times, you don't think like that.

"So you're speaking about us a lot, but if you had to mention you, which feels like a brag, but it doesn't come across at all like a brag."

I then went on to shooting as many interviews as I could because this really helps me shape the story early on.

I then try and cram in as much B-roll as I can before the end of the day—like drone footage and time lapses.

This is like the most—one of the most incredible views I think I've ever seen.

As you can probably hear, my supposed hay fever was getting a lot worse. I'm actually quite worried, to be honest, because I feel very [ __ ] high inside.

That was a bit of an understatement. I'm not doing well. I'm feeling really sick, so I have to head over to the local medical post.

So I'm going to experience kind of what it would be like without the hospital being put in. But we're lucky enough that we get to drive there.

Usually, the locals would have to walk over these intense roads.

Okay, let's go! As you can see, there's no electricity, and it's all closed right now.

That's the harsh reality. If you're severely ill in a village nearby, you'd have to make a seven-hour trek to get to the closest big facility that can help.

We had to wait for the local nurse to come open up. I'll be honest, at this moment, I felt like absolute [ __ ].

So the local nurse has just arrived. The doctor and nurse check me out, and luckily, it was nothing life-threatening—just an infection of the [ __ ]—GTI.

Yeah, GTI infection. I've got a gnarly GTI. I think I got some medicine for my GTI infection and hoped it would get me through the night and through the next days.

Okay, just a check-in. It's day number two. It's definitely tougher than it normally is.

That night, I got to rest, but at the same time, I had to ensure I planned out the shot list for the final shoot day.

3, 2, [Music] 1.

The next day, the team was hard at work finishing up the construction of the new hospital.

While still not feeling great, I pushed through the day and shot the last solar panel setup.

I also had the honor to be able to sign the final solar panel along with the rest of the team.

That same night, we were finally ready for the most exciting part—the lighting ceremony.

Just to give this context, this is the first time these people will be able to experience light at night.

"Are you ready? 3, 2, 1!"

That night, we went to bed as early as possible because the next day was going to be really, really special.

Oh my God, it's [ __ ]. This is hectic!

It is 6:20. Finally feeling better. Just packed up all our stuff. We are headed to Mount Everest this morning, which is really [Applause] [Music] exciting!

R, we're off to Everest! [Music]

Darren and I are at the highest point we've ever been together. It's been one hell of a year. You know, we've been working together just one year, and look where we are—on top of the world, literally and figuratively.

And I wouldn't share this experience with anybody else, man. I love you.

On the top of the world, and I'm starting to feel drunk.

"How you feeling?"

"Feeling exceptionally light-headed and somewhat kind of drunk."

I couldn't help but faint in the helicopter once we landed. I was told I was in a state of hypoxia, which is the lack of enough oxygen to sustain bodily functions.

Darren and I just went up 17,500 feet, but that chopper went through 19,500 feet, which is insane.

Do you know what else is [ __ ] outrageous? The next chapter of this video.

Step seven: the edit. Okay, back from Nepal, and it's time to get into the most beefy part of this video. This is the most requested tutorial that I do, which is the editing process—the entire post-production process.

So I'm going to take you through in real time how I edit this video with every single technique. This is going to be insane. I've never done anything that's remotely as comprehensive as what I'm about to do, so let's jump into it.

Remember, if you're using Resolve or Avid or any other program—Final Cut Pro—totally cool. I'm going to be using Premiere, but the process is still the same.

This is a step-by-step guide on how to edit a video the way that I'll do it, at least.

Firstly, we're going to go through setting up the project correctly. This is so overlooked sometimes. I look at other editors' projects, and the files are everywhere. They don't know where to find clips.

We're going to focus on how to folder everything correctly. It's a major, major step in the process—so, so valuable.

If you do this correctly before we import everything into the project, let's look at the folder structure within the drive.

This is what the Nepal drive looks like. Now we're going to go through this. This is exactly how I folder every single drive.

Inside footage, we've labeled it archival footage. Now, as we were able to sort archive footage from the actual organization that has just been sent to us, then there's a folder called Darren images cut to, which is just like a random folder.

If it makes sense, there's images that we can do like a quick cut. Then we've got day one, day two, day three, day four, day five as the main footage folders.

Obviously, what really helps this entire footage bin is our edit logs. Once going through all of them, if I'm confused as to what on which day—which we'll get into—this will be able to drag into Premiere Pro in a really organized way.

We've then got freelancer footage—an amazing guy that we got to work with in Nepal—someone else who came and helped out. His name's Dusty; he's awesome.

Then we've got the pickups. He then went back and was able to shoot a bunch of stuff that we just couldn't get, which is amazing.

And then all iPhone content—this is just for real verticals, that kind of stuff. And if we've got any little cutaway moments that we may need, little B-rolls on iPhone goes there.

Next is music. As you can see, now everything is the full mix sits here, but everything else is what you call stems.

Stems really help with editing in case you want to remove an instrument or if something sounds a little bit too intense. You just have more maneuverability this way.

So I tend to edit with the stems from a full track or full mix. I break those down into about five stems.

The Nepal tracks are kind of where we started off. Those are ideas, and sometimes we may return to that and be like, "Okay, cool, let's flesh that one out. Let's try that."

Once we've sort of started to get to the end, we put them in the Nepal tracks as stems—V1—as we're going through the post process. We might have V2, V3, V4 as we may make changes to the music.

Then sound, which is broken up into two parts: sound effects and raw sound recordings. Those are the sound recordings per day that were shot on the lav mics, external to what was shot internal on the camera.

Then underneath the sound effects folder is all the sound effects. This generally happens by going through stock sites and sourcing sound, but I've got such a rich library of sound effects already.

I just drag that in and pop that into that sound folder. Then what we do is we add a music diegetic folder in here, which is everything instrumentation-wise or diegetic sounds that we can then create a diegetic soundtrack out of, or we may just want to use certain moments.

There's a track [Music] here. My hands are freezing. You know, that's awesome.

So we could take that and turn that into a soundtrack as well, which will be amazing. In the footage itself, we may find moments of hits and kind of percussive sounds that we could use along the [Music] way.

The next is the additionals folder. Now, this additionals folder is super important. If you're working with a team, even another person, you're opening up a team's project so that the projects can sync.

For the additionals folder, to make sure that all the media links and stays online, it is important to categorize this by date from when you start the edit the whole way until you end the edit.

Then what you do is you take those individual sourced files and then put them into the correct folder that they should be.

Next is exports. This is where I would export the brand review, a review for Darren, a review for Mr. Beast.

But usually, what I find on drives and seeing on other people's messy drives, which is scary, is things are just all over the place.

So just export it into what's either here on this root folder or within this root folder here, which is just terrible.

This here looks like just like I want to start editing. It makes me really [ __ ] excited because everything is so perfectly organized, and I'll easily be able to navigate my way through here.

Next is animation. As you can see, the files just empty. Now, GFX—the same thing. That's just the graphic effects that are then added.

We will source these externally and then we'll pull them back in. The rest of the drive is pretty self-explanatory, and I shouldn't have to go too in-depth for this, except for final exports.

If you need to open up the project in two years' time, everything will be online. There is nothing worse than having an offline file—the red thing that says media offline.

That's like a panic attack. You don't want that. This will prevent that.

So great, that's everything. I'm going to open up Premiere, and then we're going to pull this in, and we're going to start going through everything.

All my sequences will be at 23976 frames per second, 4K, and Rec 709 color space. Regardless of shooting PAL or NTSC, it'll work for both.

Before importing anything, I'm first going to set up the sequences bin, and I'm going to lay out all the sequences as per the edit log and as per my knowledge from what we did shoot and what sequences we're going to need.

I make my first folder called "master," and that is where the master story would go. Right now, there's obviously no master story; it's just a sequence that is sitting in there called "Master Story 1."

Then two is the selects. Selects form arguably the largest part of the project. This is where all of my footage will be categorized by shot type, scene, behind the scenes, theme, or event.

This makes it extremely easy for me to find footage when placing in B-roll or when I'm looking for a shot. I'm like, "Oh, I wish I had something like that."

Instead of searching through the footage bins, I navigate directly to the selected sequences I need to search for the shot that worked the best.

Three: scenes. This is where I first build out the string outs, and then I just narrow it down and down and down until it becomes an individual scene—something congruent.

A whole bunch of scenes will be placed in here and named by those scenes, dependent on the project. But then I can go to those scenes, and it's kind of like a puzzle piece.

I go like, "Okay, cool, that scene works. Yeah, that scene, that scene, that scene, that scene."

Then I can flip them around, and these scenes don't need to be perfectly cut because I will then move it into the master folder, and the master folder will add music, etc.

So again, these scenes are for longer string outs, and then it's just reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce until I've got a kind of scene that makes sense.

Multiple different camera angles.

Four is for interviews. This is, like I said before, the narration of the film. This is what drives the film forward.

Interviews are split into three separate sequences: synced, cut, and selected. The synced sequence will have two camera angles and the audio synced together.

Then in the cut sequence, it's the entire interview still, but with all the "ums," the "ahs," and my questions removed.

If I've conducted the interview, it's kind of just also

Then pull something one by one. However, in this case, obviously, it was just a copy-paste, so no need to do that. So that's not all remained in sync. It's going to stay there just like that. I'm probably never going to return to that.

And now we're going to really start chopping. As you can see here, I'm busy removing just most of my talking and just all the prompts. "Y responsible travel, responsible travel and adventure, and adventure." So you can see here she fumbled on her line.

We believe in empowering future leaders. We believe in the power of... We're going to take her "we" from here because I asked her to start again. So, as you can see, there's going to be a lot of repeat of what she's saying because I'm only in the Melissa selected sequence once.

It goes to the cut sequence; that's when I've actually cut it up. This is why you guys are so good at what you do. Okay, we got a good cry moment here. Just pop it up one like this.

Okay, so I'm done with this first interview. So, as you can see, I took something that was 45 minutes, and it's already only on 5 minutes. But remember, this is not the final cut sequence; this is just a selected.

So now I'm going to pull it into the cut sequence, but I'm not going to cut it down yet. I'm leaving it there. I've banked all the knowledge in my head, and I can remember what she said. Then I'm going to start playing around with cutting and then building her sequence out for the cutting sequence.

But again, so great to have all of these options. So if I have to ever return here, I can. Her interview, if it goes into the film, even we have decided sometimes a character just doesn't complement the film. It would max be 40 seconds.

Now what I'm going to do is you're going to see a hyper time lapse of me doing all the other interviews. Let's go.

Okay, I finished a select sequence called Dan Hospital. What I'm going to do is, because I know that this is going to make the project, I'm going to create the scene for this.

So what I'll do in here is create a duplicate Dan Hospital scene and then pull that into scenes. Now, once I pulled that in there, what I do is I pull this down below. Now I can go through here, and each I watch a clip that I like. I've got to go over to, and then I can just pull it down.

This means that then up here, I can just make my legs, but this still keeps the full clip up top. So if I want to, I can pull that into there and then just select the moment that I like, and it still remains up here untouched.

I'm going to now go through this and create a nice congruent scene out of this hospital. It's a 10-minute long select sequence, and I want to try and get it down to about, I would say, a 2-minute scene.

Then from there, we'll cut it down even further when going into the master. So the scene will then get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller as we go along. But I want to try and create it as a nice contained scene.

Right now, let's go. I've made the Dan Hospital scene much shorter, so it runs in a nice congruent order here, which is ready to go into the project.

So now I'm going to do the same thing about another 40 times. I'm going to go through all of these select sequences and then create scenes for those select sequences. I'm going to finish that all tonight.

It's going to be a very, very long night. Then tomorrow, I'm going to start off with building out the master, which currently now is empty. But that's okay because tomorrow morning, I'm going to start off with a brew bar.

How's about that? I'm just going to put me right in. Actually, speaking of... Ah, F run. Okay, before I go into the earliest night of editing, another brew bar.

Okay, let's do this.

Okay, God, the time is now 5:38 a.m., and my alarm says it's going to go off in 30 minutes. That's like the normal time I wake up. I will see you tomorrow. Actually, yeah, like today. Later today, I'll see you later today.

Today, we're going to start building out our master sequence, our very first master.

Okay, as you can see it here, what I'm going to do is try and build a chronological story right from the beginning to the end. So for this, I'm actually going to write this script as I go along.

We dub our videos in nine or 11 different languages, dependent on the video. So when having everything written out on a script beforehand or as I'm going, it makes it a little bit easier.

I don't have to then go afterwards and write it out word for word. I can actually just make changes. Then what I do is I record my voice in the place of where Jimmy's voice would go for voiceover.

This is a great way to fill in the gaps within the story. It's like, "Oh, I wish that person said this," or "I wish that this was said," or "How do we bring the gap between this and this?"

This voiceover will be done with my voice for now, and then later on, you'll see how Jimmy then records the voiceover for this.

So I've opened up my script. While going through the script, then I like to also put in parts like this where it's like kind of like editing prompts. Then I like to read the script out loud, kind of in Jimmy's inflections.

And I have to put my glasses on because... Okay, 10 days ago, this hospital at the very top of a 10,000-foot mountain in one of the most remote parts of Nepal looked like this.

Feels like it might be a bit wordy. As you can see, I'm now altering parts of the way in which this is done. So I'm just going to record my VO saying this, and then if it doesn't work, I'm going to come back, and we're going to start again.

10 days ago, this hospital at the very top of a 10,000-foot mountain in the middle of the most remote parts of Nepal looked like this.

Drop this.

Oh, one of the things to mention is that usually I'd be using headphones, but for the sake of this tutorial, obviously, I'm not going to be using headphones.

Another big thing is that make sure you are wired in with your headphones. If you are using headphones, there is a lag with the Bluetooth on headphones. I'm sure most of you know this, but when you're cutting, when you're very specific to cutting to the music as well as sound sync on the voice, Bluetooth headphones don't go there.

The very top of a 10,000-foot mountain in the middle of the most remote parts... Okay, what I've realized is we've mentioned 10 and 10 again. That's not a good thing.

The mountain is above 10,000 feet, but I would always pull it to a rounded-off number here. We might have to go 9,000 just so it doesn't go 10 days ago, 10,000.

Go back to the script. This is the process people don't understand about editing is how much back and forth there is. I recorded those lines; I didn't even think about it until I put it into sequence, and I was like, "H okay, it doesn't... 10 and 10 doesn't sound right."

As soon as you play it back, once the viewer clicks on the video, we want them to understand.

So to the thumbnail and title, which we can see here, we powered a mountain, and you can see all the solar panels. We want them to understand in this that we are going to see 10 days ago, this hospital at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain.

So we're speaking to this remote high mountain that has all these solar panels on it, and that has to correlate with the hospital because that's the whole intention of this video: to bring power to the village, to bring power to the hospital.

In going back and forth with the titles and thumbnails, we powered a hospital. We powered... You know, those weren't as clickable titles as the one that we landed with.

And the thumbnail, as soon as people click on the video, because this is Beast philanthropy, people have come here to see Jimmy. So we'll put him right up front in this section.

10 days ago, that's enough just to know that, okay, cool, I'm clicking on a Beast video, and I've seen his face. Let's get this hooked down, and then we're going to go into the rest of the story.

Okay, so now we know what we're going to do is open up the selects, and then if we're happy with those selects, we're then going to open up the scene that are created for those selects.

See, an important part about segmenting these is I've got exterior, interiors, machinery, then a scene that I need. I needed to build out.

So obviously, we want the contrast imagery here, so we want the best match cut from great to something that's unfinished. So we're going to go to hospital prior, and we're going to see the match cuts between the two.

We've locked the first 7 seconds, 7 to 9 seconds, which is a great start. What I'm going to have to do now is get on a plane, go to India. I'm not even talking [ __ ] and then I'm going to pick up this edit and continue it from there.

While I'm in India, I'm going to also be shooting a project that we're doing there, so I'm going to have to edit this in the night. This is insane.

Okay, see you in India.

Okay, I've just arrived in my hotel room. Very minimal setup in India, just my laptop. I've got a mini keyboard just in case.

What I'm going to focus on tonight is trying to get to the 1 minute 30 mark. Might seem unrealistic; possibly it is, but I'm just going to go for it anyways.

This is very formulaic, and this is how I break apart this first 1 minute 30 seconds. We'll start off with the first 5 to 7 seconds, which is impact. This is delivering a line that's impactful.

This is usually always said by Mr. Beast, Jimmy, delivering to camera. This gets a reaction from the audience. Then we have the 7 to 30 second mark, which is the hook.

So you go impact, people look at it, they go "ah," then the hook is giving people a reason to care. It's a reason to want to stay longer and watch the film because this is a problem that they can somewhat relate to.

This is where I would start to introduce more global themes: things like the bare necessities, electricity, water, food, travel, medical. Even though that may be right up front and impact, I'll then still bring that across in the hook, the first 30 seconds.

But remember, the goal here, as well as to tell a compelling story, we also need to keep the viewer here. The average view duration... I'm not just teaching you how to make a video that's people are going to watch forever about meaningless [ __ ].

This is like a hybrid version of making cinematic artistic films with integrity that are endearing, but at the same time using a formula in order to try and keep the audience to watch the whole way through.

Because with Beast philanthropy, the higher the views, the higher the revenue that's generated from the views, and the more people that we can help. And that's really important: to be able to tell really compelling stories that get high views.

That's something that's a very complicated thing, and over time, I've developed this way in order to do so.

Three, the 30 to 1 minute 30 mark now we are establishing. This is now where we start to communicate the story. All the stuff that moves its way to the hook till the 30-second mark, as an audience, I'm watching it, and I go, "Okay, now I'm hooked. Tell me the story."

This happens so much, and I think that not many editors speak about this. I had some time to move away from the edit while I was on the plane, and when I arrived here, I took a look at the impact sequence that I had made back in Cape Town, and it just wasn't good.

So now I'm starting again. That's totally okay. Editing is something that either it moves really quickly based on the fact that you're in some form of flow state, whatever you want to call it, and you're really feeling it, and it works well, and the story just comes to you.

Or things will lag in the beginning, and you're kind of going back and forth and back and forth. I like to really build my foundations. I like to start off really strong, and then I find from there it's smooth sailing.

And this is the hardest part: this first 1 minute 30 seconds. Once I've gotten over this hill, perfectly fine, then I know that I've got a golden film.

When I watched the intro scene, the impact scene, it just didn't get me, so I'm taking these starting from scratch. So I'm going back to the whiteboard, going to try rewrite that line.

"10 days, this hospital looked like this." That's like the most perfect answer to that. So if people click on the video, we powered a mountain. We invested because we understand mountain correlates with mountain.

It is the first and the first. I couldn't have pre-written this. Well, I could have, but I needed to try the other thing to know that this was the right way to go. But I'm feeling good about this one now.

Okay, so we've answered mountain here. Now we've got it powered. Now we're kind of speaking about a hospital, and in that hospital, we want to sort of see solar, know that power and mountain both correlate in the first 7 seconds.

I wish I was smart enough to have just written all of this right up front, taking you on that whirlwind.

Okay, 10 days ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain in one of the most remote parts of Nepal, this hospital looked like this.

Feels better. Going to airdrop to my computer into that late-night grind.

Okay, so what I'm going to do now is combine the impact and the hook. So I'm going to get myself to the 30-second mark. I think that's what the struggle was in the beginning: taking the impact and leading it into the hook.

I've got the story; I've got the impactful part written, and I've recorded my voice there. That will be replaced with Jimmy's voice when we record his VO.

But I want to continue that just to the 30-second mark, to the communication, to just understand what comes after the impact.

And this I'll do also with music, and I'll get myself to a point, and then I'm going to start putting in the footage in the B-roll, get to that point, and then I'm going to go from 30 seconds the whole way to a minute.

Okay, now what we want to start doing is building the motif into a kind of sad sense, but then the track can move upward.

And there's a track here we made called Everest, which has this kind of like uneasy feeling.

10 days ago, this hospital at the very top of a 9,000... What I love about this first track that we made is that it's really unsettling in the beginning, but when you start to get to this point here, just feel how empowering this is.

It's unsettling, but as you can hear, it's empowering too. It goes into this like really just makes me feel like it can take over the world.

That's not what we want to do right now. We don't overpower the audience. Remember, what's really important with music is that nobody should ever compliment how good the music is in the film.

The edit should amplify the story, and in the edit is the music, and the music should amplify the edit. Kind of getting these comments that, "Oh wow, the edit was so great," that pulls away from the story.

As an editor, as much as I would like to flex these things and get told that, "Oh wow, the edit's so great," that kind of means that I've done a pretty poor job in telling the story.

Because I've taken people out of that. And then again, yes, maybe there are other filmmakers that are commenting on the edit and the way that it was done, but the point of making a film isn't to make a great edit.

The point of making a film is to tell a great story. I've got to focus on the story. It's all about story.

And now we look at music. Remember, when working with stems, you can use a click track. After time editing, you will just be able to count music. It's very basic in 44, but if you really want to, you can just keep your click there.

Then we can pull in these stems. Now remember to pull in the stems from the first point, so right at the start. Then obviously everything's going to...

So if you play with the bass, it's going to make sense. Horns as well. Make sure you know which is which.

I kind of like to go from the most used instrument and then work my way down. So it's usually like anything melodic, and then it goes to percussion and then anything else.

Because strings are the most used, we'll put strings right up front here, and then we'll go to piano, no percussion. We've got some rises; we should have some cymbals.

These are important. I return to using cymbals all the time to wean down from a track, wean down from an emotion.

Okay, I'm going to take the GCK track off because it's just going to irritate the [ __ ] out of me, but you get the point.

Once you've chosen a track that you want to kind of motif around, this is what you want to tease the audience with. You're kind of teasing them with the melody right up front, being what we've already heard.

So we understand this. Every time there's something unsettling, we can return to that. That also helps the audience not have to focus too much on the music because you're just reminding them of a feeling that they've already felt when watching documentaries or watching brilliant pieces of film like American Beauty, like Interstellar, like Shutter Island.

Watch it normally and don't try to focus on the music, but then go and watch it and think about how the motifs have been used.

Use these as examples. Much earlier in this tutorial, I spoke about referencing. This is really important. Music is so integral in the editing process.

So we have our first 30 seconds that has our narrative locked off, and we've got our motion because we've got our music. Now I can start going back and working from the beginning and getting us here.

Okay, I'm going to spend the rest of the night cutting as much as I can.

When we were there, I filmed this guy just playing a simple track, and I think like as I come out of the intro, because it's kind of harsh, what I find works is kind of going into a diegetic soundtrack.

And he has a local Nepali man who stays in this village who's also working on the hospital. So when I was there, I asked him to play a track on his guitar.

What I'm going to try to do now is find the right keys here. There are programs like Logic that can quantize for you, meaning they can stick something in like a 1 by 16.

Basically, it's just a simple bar structure that everything sticks on a metronome beat, but I wouldn't worry about that. I'll just get a click track.

This won't be on because he's playing live like this. There's no way that he would be perfectly quantized, but what we can do is find segments and then figure out, "Okay, fine, this is right."

Therefore, we need to figure out this key and then play something similar here, and then I'm going to record something in, do a voice recording, send it to Jason, then we can make a diegetic track.

The idea is to utilize the opening now to get us into the culture. So we've seen from right up front the realities of where we are, and now we want to kind of start to tease this beautiful piece of music in.

Again, I don't know if that's going to work. There's a whole bunch of trial and error. So what I'm going to do is take this, put it in a different scene, and just hold it there for now, and then have different options available for this beginning section of the film.

So what we'll do always with music like this is you want to start off with a bar.

My hands are freezing. You know, that's fine.

Okay, so there's that part in it. Like, that's like endearing, you know, where it ends, and he's like, "My hands, they're freezing," you know?

And like to end it there, like that's something that would be beautiful because it breaks that fourth wall. It takes you through the understanding that this is not a fictionalized piece of film; this is real.

You can also hear the voice from behind the camera and the reassurance that it's okay, and it's also his vulnerability. Like, he didn't have to be playing a beautiful, perfect piece of music.

It's beautiful by itself and in its rawness, and we're going to take that and try and turn it into something.

So here from this lead, and is what I like.

This song's from 1957, so I found some sheet music, which is for guitar solo. We can just turn it into piano, but I have to try and figure this [ __ ] out again.

We got an E, got a random E, doesn't feel right. Got an E.

Oh, BR, where am I? But then would we come the whole way down to a...

Got a G and C. We got an E.

Okay, you know what? F that. This is where you toss out music theory, and we just listen.

CU, that all sounded nice. So if we go 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, so it's kind of like we got six bars almost.

I figured out what that man was playing, and I figured out somewhat the piano that should accompany that.

Then I'm going to take the stem of the guitar, these different stems, because the bottom here should be...

[Laughter] Going, we know we finish up on a sizzle.

Okay, so we're just going to record something in, and we send it to Jason.

Ah, you know what? We're going to call Jason instead, okay? Just to get into it.

It can be introduced by an ambient sound that is in key that will then help the...

So it's like two ambient keys, so they're like long, like open, wavy keys that then lead into the guitar over it.

Turn that into a song, send it over. Let's go, boy. Cheers, my brew. Love you.

Working with musicians is an incredible thing, and I'm super blessed that I'm able to do it.

Again, if you don't have the ability to work with musicians, you can still make it work this way. This is just part of my process. You're coming on the journey with me, so let's go.

This is how I make a...

Ah, I'm so tired. Just got to keep going. Just got to keep going.

Okay, I just arrived in New Delhi. As I said, I'm busy with another shoot while editing this film, but be with me.

I was able to finish the first 1 minute 30 seconds in the exact format I spoke about. It works every single time.

And before I continue with this edit, I'm going to turn this hotel room into my new editing studio.

And it's 2:15, so I've put up my whiteboard, and I'm not going to write anything on it tonight. I'm going to get back on it tomorrow.

Been traveling the whole day. You know what? Actually, if there wasn't a deadline ever, I wonder if any film would ever get finished.

The deadline is what's forcing me to push, but it's also the internal conflict of going how efficient I'm going to be versus how innovative I'm going to be.

How much art can I put into this without completely just destroying my sleep cycle, which is already completely destroyed?

Making this tutorial, I'm actually learning more about the film-making process than I think I knew.

There's a quote: "If you want to learn something, read it. If you want to understand it, write it. And if you want to master it, teach it."

I'm not saying that this is me mastering it, but so far over the last 2 months, just by forcing myself to talk to the camera and explain the process, I've in turn learned so much more.

Now I'm getting like way deep. This is procrastination. I'm going to go to bed, and then I'm going to finish this edit. That's the plan.

It is the morning of day eight of the edit. The whiteboard, which is sitting dormant and blank behind me, is now back in commission.

The reason being is now that I've got that 1 minute 30 mark, I can let the story breathe a bit. I can really go into detail into the different characters.

So I'm busy writing down the character arcs and where I can take it from here. Now that I've really got the audience hooked, I can now really move into an engaging and compelling narrative.

This is where the puzzle piecing begins, but this is also where the sad part of the edit begins, which is sacrifice.

Unfortunately, when I was shooting something, I may have thought this was a fantastic moment. This is definitely going to make the edit. Wow, what a great story.

But in the context of the overall story, it's just not going to fit. Saying goodbye to those scenes is really difficult at times, but one has to constantly, as spoken about before, think about the log line.

The Hemingway approach of telling a story in its most simple form: is this going to make sense to the overall narrative? And if not, say goodbye.

As you can see, I'm breaking down each of the characters here, and now I'm busy with Darren's scene.

And yeah, this is how it's done. Then what I also do is I've got a little bit of a whiteboard situation going on over here, and this helps me be in arm's length of the computer.

So I can go and then come over here and jot things down, and then I go over here, and then I write things on this big board.

And I come here because I'm done with Melissa's scene, and I use this thing right here.

Then I use this thing, and I just got to this. Sorry, this one-hand vlog thing may look terrible because I've taken it from the...

To here, now I'm going to change that to Darren.

Another thing that I do while editing to help me stay on track is I write down every hour or every two hours what I would like to complete in that time.

Cool, back to the edit. So Jimmy just messaged me to say that he needs to see the film in 5 hours, and that Darren wants to see it in person in 5 hours.

So the only option here is for me to absolutely give it horns on this edit. I'm going to put the camera there and just time-lapse me editing for 5 hours.

It's going to be impossible for me to explain what I'm doing while I'm doing it, and then I'm going to miss my deadline, and then things are going to be catastrophic.

So a new development in this tutorial, which in hindsight I actually think would have been better, is that I complete the film and then show you all my decision-making along the way.

However, we've gotten to this point already, and I feel like we've had a really intimate and amazing journey, so I might as well keep on keeping on with what I was keeping on doing.

And also, not showing you the film until it's complete is really good for the AV for this video, so that's another good thing.

It's currently 8:27 p.m. I've got just less than 5 hours. Wish me luck. Here goes.

I'm nervous.

Now that the first draft of the video is done, this is the scariest part of the process. If you are making a video for a client, this is what happens next: this is the first review, the client review.

I'm looking at this video, and I'm thinking it's good. It's okay. It still needs work, but there's a time constraint as a client that needs to be able to watch it.

We currently are on a Beast philanthropy shoot, so Darren, the executive director of Beast philanthropy, who has the ultimate say over the film, over if it's good enough, what he says matters most.

What he thinks, so he's going to come around now, he's going to watch it, and he's going to tell me if he thinks it's [ __ ].

Oh, he is down. Always have a snack prepared just in case.

I'm coming. Why are you running in?

Yeah, have a... Oh, I'm keeping these. Thanks.

Ah, I don't know if D's going to be happy, but anyway.

Okay, you're ready.

One month ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain, while Dan got some rest, Darren and the team were hard at work building the structure of the solar grid.

I can see doctors have to perform on the... that whatever that instrument is playing right now. Can you bring that out like a little bit more? Bring it to the front.

It's awesome, man. I really think that Dan is a genius because every single step along the way, Dan is a master at his craft.

From the storytelling to the directing to the videography to the editing to the music composing, with subject matter that most people think is impossible to do, and that is to make engaging videos about charity concepts and positive concepts.

This is really, really difficult, but Dan has figured out a way to consistently deliver.

We've decided to alter the script. Darren and Jimmy are going to take a crack at the script for the next two days and kind of go back and forth, and then it's going to come back to me.

Hopefully, it's not completely different. I'll try my best.

That review actually went really good considering the time constraints. It's ridiculous.

So I've been editing this on the go. I've got a board of plane to Los Angeles tomorrow morning, but by the time I get there, I should have a list of all the changes that need to be made within the video.

Hopefully, they're not too many, and then we're nearly at the finish line.

This has been the longest journey. I wonder how long this video is. I'm going to take a guess right now how long this video is, and I'm going to say it's 2 hours and 10 minutes long.

Where we currently are right now, I don't want this video to be any longer than 2 and a half hours. I think I might just be a little bit too long.

If you are still hanging around, thank you, and I'll see you in Los Angeles.

Oh, oh, that could have been bad.

Okay, I'm in my Airbnb in Los Angeles. I was able to finish most of these changes on the plane, which is awesome.

Actually, I was able to finish the whole film on the plane without giving away too many spoilers because obviously, go watch the full film on Beast philanthropy, which link below, and there you'll see the full film, the full finished product.

What I'm going to do now is take you through the decisions made on how I got to certain parts, the most poignant parts within this edit, the decisions I made around music and how I utilized the crescendo in the soundtracks, the decisions I made around match cuts, the decisions I made around the way in which I use Jimmy's voiceover, the way I use Jimmy talking to camera, the different interviews, the different characters.

Essentially, how I shaped the story to get it to a point which makes you really feel something. Hopefully, I don't give away too much, but hopefully, I can give you enough so that you can learn from the set and at the same time enjoy it when watching the full film.

So just starting off, what I'm going to do is I'll play the intro.

Okay, a few months ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain in a remote part of Nepal, this hospital looked like this.

As I mentioned in the whiteboard scene before, which is really interesting to go back and kind of look at, is the jarring shots.

This used to look like this, and I didn't think that that would be powerful enough before going to Nepal. And then when coming back and looking at it, it obviously really works with going from here to there, being made really strong.

A few months ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain in a remote part of Nepal...

So on the top of a 9,000-foot mountain, very clearly, directly as to what it is in a remote part of Nepal, you want to kind of start to feel the culture here.

This hospital, this hospital which now looks beautiful, it's got solar panels, it's amazing, it's got paint, like, and then we show what it looked like, and we have that impact on the sound.

Boom!

Oh, how do I do this without showing the whole video? This is going to be impossible for me to do without showing the entire film and ruining the experience of watching the full film.

So what I suggest is going and opening up a new tab right now and watching this film. I've linked it below. As I've said, it's called "We Power Mountain." Just type in Beast philanthropy on YouTube, "We Power Mountain."

Watch the film, and then come back here, and then I'm going to break it down for you in depth.

I'm hungry anyway, so while you do that, I'm going to get some dinner.

Cool, now that you've watched the video, let's dive into it.

Great, starting again. As you'll see right up top here, this is a grade. I'll get into the grade later. It's just easier to watch for now with the grade on.

I'll explain it later. If I obviously take the grade off, we'll see it flat like this. So this is just with the grade on it.

I will take you through how I grade very basically at the end of this. Let me take you through the story structure and why certain decisions were made in order to tell the story and really give you those emotions.

I hope you enjoyed the video. If you thought the video was [ __ ], well then, I mean, there's no real point in watching this noise there.

So if you did return, awesome. Let's continue.

A few months ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain in a remote part of Nepal, this hospital looked like this.

Okay, so right up front, the first lines that were changed was a few months ago, this hospital looked like this.

So what happened is when we arrived, the hospital was a little bit more developed. So what we did is we sourced footage of the hospital a little bit prior to this, so a few months before we got there, so that the contrast could be a little bit more jarring, a little bit more harsh.

As you'll see with this here, that really helps.

Obviously, lining those up together really helps nicely. That really gives it that impact again. Just such a powerful line up front.

And then just to amplify that slightly, it's just the sound. If we just solo these sound effects...

A few months ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain in a remote part of Nepal, this hospital looked like this.

Just simple impacts and some ambient sounds there just really help with the emphasis of that moment.

And then after that, I still wanted to showcase the ruins and what the hospital used to look like.

Then when we're going into the next section here, because of its isolation, this community has no electricity, meaning that local doctors have no access to proper medical equipment and often had to perform surgeries and complex procedures in the dark using only a flashlight and very basic tools.

If more complex care was needed, it would take hours to walk to a better medical facility.

These limitations have resulted in many fatalities and miscarriages.

So that gets us to the end of a scene. That gets us to the end of the 30-second mark.

Remember, when going through, what we really wanted to focus on was this first 9 seconds, so up until here, then to get us to that 30-second mark.

And then from there, to get us to that 1 minute 30-second mark, and that's what I'm going to show you right now and how we are keeping the audience here.

How hopefully you were engaged throughout watching this piece and really keeping you questioning and wanting more and trying to unravel the story yourself, but continually being surprised with new insights and, you know, emotively being evoked.

Right in the beginning here, kind of the hardships, the more harsh realities.

And for there to be a nuance that's identified over and above there just being the fact that there's no electricity and a way to be able to power this hospital, which results in a lack of medical care, we need to go deeper.

We need to really dive in and find that nuance, and that's where we're going to get to now.

We've got to the 30-second mark. Hopefully, we've hooked you with one, an impact right up front, and then the hook.

And now we're going to start to communicate.

Another really exciting part about the post-process is these kind of like "aha" moments. It's kind of like, "Oh, [ __ ], yes, this works really well."

And that's when things match cut with an unexpected match cut or how to blend two scenes together seamlessly.

And sometimes things just perfectly match.

And a moment like this in the edit visually is this moment here. I go from this dark scene where you can see the showcase of the iconography where a woman has to utilize fire, one for heat, another for light.

And then from there, I can move over to a doctor with a torch.

So just watch how this moves together.

Has no electricity, meaning that local doctors have no...

These two things kind of seamlessly match cuts and just make so much sense.

And this is where the writing of the script and the visual starts to come together.

And there was a little bit of change here. I know that I speak about don't alter the script based upon the visual, but in this case, the script didn't have to change too much, and the visual really helped to amplify the script.

So these two really accompany each other well.

Now I just want to speak about animation. Firstly, before going into how the animation is done with Beast philanthropy, when I came on board a year and a half ago, I wanted to redesign the way in which the animation is done.

I wanted to give it this kind of papery texture, this feeling of an imperfect, more textured animatic, so it feels as if it's unfinished.

It feels like it was made out of paper. This really helps match the tone of the whole piece, the believability, the realism.

If taking it far away and putting it into a 4D space or Unreal Engine and making it look like really great graphics, it just wouldn't fit.

As you would have seen if you do follow the Beast philanthropy films, these have gotten better in time as we've been going.

You know, we've been working with animators to create it in a better way and make it fit.

So just to talk about how the animations are done, I don't do the anim at all. We outsource animations.

Animations like this length, they aren't too expensive to outsource. You can use sites like Fiverr, or you can find an animator that you work well with.

A 10-second animation like this would cost max around $200 to $250.

And another part about these animations is the way that I call it bleed in and bleed out. Maybe that's not the right way to look at it, but you can call it folding in and folding out.

It's using the alpha channels so that we can go from the one to the other.

A better example is how we exit this animation.

As you see over here, to walk to a better medical facility, these limitations have resulted in many fatalities and miscarriages.

So our long... So all that happens is when I export, I get it to a certain point where I give the animator an in and an out point, and then they can take and just do this technique.

It just helps put the animation in the same environment.

And what I really wanted to communicate there is the distance, how far it would take for somebody who was in a severe circumstance to get from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the mountain where there is actual proper medical care.

Shout out to the animator here; his name is Kyle. He's awesome.

You don't always need animation, but if you can't afford to have animation, there are ways around this as well.

I mean, you can invent ways to make this easier. There are also ways of doing this yourself.

I can show you how I've done what I call stop-motion scrapbooking, which takes far too long, where I literally sit and I cut out all these bits and bobs, and I put them on top of one another, and it shows the stuff.

This is just a far easier, more efficient way of doing it and working with great people and building this out together, and it just becomes more and more seamless the more you work with the same person.

Then here, what I wanted to mention is this is a great example of learning when to sacrifice something that you put a lot of work into.

Now remember when I was sitting in India, and I got excited because that man was playing guitar, and I found Jason, and we recorded that track, and we made that track, which actually sounds really awesome.

I'll play a piece of it here. We fleshed it out into like a full track with quiet CCK tracks.

I mean...

So here I'm like, "Yes, I really want to use this. This sounds awesome."

And listen to like when it goes into the break of the track.

Beautiful.

And then, and obviously ends with the part that I liked: "My hands are freezing."

You know, and then with a laughter, and that scene was going to go in here, and originally it was in here, and it just didn't work.

So I took it out, and it hurt. But again, think about how you're going to advance the story, not how you're going to make just a piece that's like a flex because you put a lot of work into doing something, and then it just turns out that it didn't work in the first place because that happens in every single film.

Every single film.

So then instead, I wanted to go bang right into it and go down, and Darren went to Kagan and arrived, and then start to showcase the environment.

The reason why we went in the first place is because it was the Green Program and Give Power that made us aware of this project.

And as you saw in the shooting scene before, we were so graciously invited into these people's houses, the community's houses, that I really wanted to showcase this right up front.

Part of Nepal that we were in was just so amazing, but we don't have the time to really lengthen this out right up front.

But we can pepper in these beautiful shots throughout the edit.

So let's just watch that scene quickly.

And miscarriages.

So our long-term partners, Give Power, who we have worked with in three previous Beast philanthropy videos, asked me and Darren to join them on a trek to the village of Kagan to help them solve this problem, where they were given an incredibly warm welcome and undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

On the first morning, Darren met up with a local Give Power engineer named Sanjay, who told him a tragic story about Nera, a woman from the village who had previously lost her baby due to the freezing temperatures and lack of appropriate medical facilities and equipment.

She had to travel in the monsoon roads to the nearest birthing center, and then since the birthing center was far away, she had to lose the baby.

And due to a lack of government funding, this hospital would not get electricity until at least 2030.

If the hospital was up and running with the building facility, the case with her would have been completely different.

Darren knew we had to act fast to prevent this from happening again.

So he also met Melissa, the founder of the Green Program, who brought a bunch of incredible students and volunteers to help finish this massive project.

When I was younger, I was visiting my family in Malaysia. It was the first time I saw the ocean. It was the first time I saw the reef.

And it was really the first time where I realized that if we had the opportunity to show people the beauty of nature and the world, it really unlocked something that makes us want to protect it too.

So we've essentially taken students from all over the world who care so deeply about making an impact, and being able to expose our future generations to different perspectives is a way that we believe can really make the world a better place.

After meeting Sanjay and Melissa, Darren was more inspired than ever before to get to work.

So the whole way up till now, 2 minutes 12 seconds, what's really interesting about this section, we get to understand Melissa's hero journey tale.

We get to understand that it's not just helping the people from Kagan, but it's also connecting communities from around the world.

It's taking brilliant minds and attaching them to a problem in Nepal and helping these people come together and fix and come to some sort of solution.

And that's really where we want to get to by this point.

Now emphasizing from where we heard just before at the 1 minute 27 mark, we needed to act fast to make change to now we're going to go into...

And this really inspired Darren to want to get involved and make this difference.

So we've got those two parts again, both urgency parts with a little bit of narrative that really helps you care.

I don't know if you picked up on this, but if you did, well done.

I did actually end up using a little bit of the piece from the piece that was created from the guitar piece with the guitar man.

However, it wasn't a guitar piece; it was just bits of the piano.

So we used inspiration from that, and I'll show you just which part that was over here.

As you can see here, it's the guitar diegetics and with the piano.

It's a beautiful song.

So yeah, but the whole piece, the whole idea of it was obviously to connect us to the diegetic and the location through utilizing the man with the guitar and then coming out of the scene from that.

But we're able to use a piece of the soundtrack, which is good.

Cool, inspired than ever before to get to work by installing a solar array in batteries to power the new hospital, as well as provide all the equipment to outfit a safe and modern birthing center to serve this vulnerable community.

Okay, the use of the second animation is because we've already teased it right up front with a tiny little bit of sizzle of what the ending of the hospital is going to look like, what the resolve is going to look like.

We don't want to have to return to this, and we also don't want to showcase and give away too much.

It also helps the audience to understand what it looks like to install a solar array and power the hospital in an animatic form.

So this is just a way of showcasing different iconography that will help encompass without having to show every single nut, screw, bolt, piece of equipment that's needed in order to do so.

Animation helps really sum this all up in a beautiful way, but again, if you can't do animation, it doesn't matter.

You can then do these kind of match cuts and get through to that way.

Vulnerable.

Okay, we're ready for day one.

So the team was beyond excited to get to work. By the end of the first day, the team managed to finish all the digging and wiring.

I can put my finger now.

This next scene should showcase what's going to happen on day one, which is the first day of construction.

Construction is boring, so generally what I like to do is take certain moments and add in sounds that match the soundtrack.

So it's just a generic drum track, just a percussive track. And so when it goes, we can then have in different elements where, "Yeah, yeah, we've got the Beast philanthropy, let's go!"

And it leads up, and so the team was beyond excited to get to work.

So you can hear with the sound effects, "Ah, yay!"

Why?

The team managed to finish all the digging and wiring, and then it quickly goes through.

I mean, that was a 15 to 20 second scene of just showcasing something that's generally quite boring.

You don't want to watch people building stuff.

I mean, you can show it in a way like that, and that's an exciting way to show it.

It showcases people; it showcases them having fun. It showcases them doing it together and also adds in sound and music and blends it together and makes it a little bit more exciting.

What we have here now, after we've got that, we've now also been given some space.

It goes fast space, fast space, fast space.

The space that we get given here is for Darren to start communicating with the camera.

We haven't really had a moment yet where Darren can talk to the camera, and Darren is the main supporting role to Jimmy.

Jimmy is the opener; he's the main character. He is the owner of Beast philanthropy, as well as he is the narrator of the piece.

Then we listen to Darren, and then I come on somewhat of a sidekick to Darren's character.

This is kind of a late part to bring Darren in. You know, usually we bring him in much earlier in the film, but in this case, it just made sense to bring Darren in here.

This is the 2:43 minute mark, so yeah, it is late to bring him in, but this is his line here.

It's so endearing, and we needed to meet the community first for this to make sense for his line.

What we're about to watch now to make sense.

I can't really put my finger on it, but there is something about the people in this village. Their authenticity, their friendliness, and their openness has made me feel part of their families in just a few days.

As we walked up to this house, somebody ran inside, and he...

L, her find there's smoke coming out, and we didn't know what was going on, but he went to go brew some tea.

This is Himalayan black tea with ginger, and it is really the best tea I've ever had in my entire life.

This is the culture over here. These people are incredibly welcoming, and everywhere you go, they want to take care of us.

They have literally opened up their houses and given us a bedroom in their house so that Dan and I have a comfortable place to stay.

But not longer.

Okay, so that scene is 30 seconds long, and what it does is beautifully encapsulate a moment that kind of pulls you away from the project at hand and gives you some time to spend with the community and understand how beautifully warm and welcoming this community is.

It also speaks about tea; it speaks about certain quick sacrifices that the community had to make in order just to get us tea, which also in turn invites the audience again on the ground in Nepal, makes you feel like you are there.

Remember, because we were moving the audience away from the hospital, and now we're having time to communicate with the people, with the culture, which is so important because the two are so tightly knit.

It makes you care even more.

So remember when I spoke about this is Nera, who's one person from Kagan, and he has a whole bunch of people from Kagan.

Look how incredible they are. Look how amazing.

And I can honestly say that being there, these people are so amazing, so welcoming, so beautiful.

And I speak for myself here, but this was by far the most beautiful trip that I've been on.

I just felt immediately a part of this culture and so welcomed, and I really wanted that to be showcased within this film.

And this moment here with Darren really encapsulates that.

So now next, because we've, like I said, we're going kind of slower, hard fact, slower, hard, slower, boom.

So now what we're going to do is we're going to go into the next section, which I'll just play for you.

Not long after the construction began, Dan started to feel ill.

I feel like super sick. Got to go over to the local post to get checked out, which means he can experience first just how difficult it is to get treated in such a remote location.

As you can see, everything's locked up here, and that's the hard reality.

If you severely ill in the village nearby, you'd have to make a 7-hour trek to get to the closest big facility that can help.

Fortunately, there was a first on-site that was able to see him.

This is Karuna, a nurse in the local town of Kagan. She's come to help me, but because there is no electricity, she can only do a very basic checkup.

She came to the conclusion that Dan had...

Gatti.

Gatti?

I've got GTI.

It's a rare disease, actually. It's just a minor cold.

Okay, so again now what's happened is, like I spoke about earlier, there does need to be some form of comic relief.

And yes, at the time, I was really sick, and it felt like I was literally dying.

So I thought like, you know, I had a GTI, which is technically a cold.

Story-wise, it worked so perfectly. It was a seamless way of me being able to showcase the harsher realities of what these conditions were like by using myself as a vehicle in order to do so.

This is very serendipitous. Yes, I was sick, but at the same time, it was great for the story and for the narrative.

So it's a kind of a loss-win-win situation.

Win-win in post because I've forgotten about being sick.

Then at the end, it gives us that comic relief when Jimmy says, "Actually, it's just a minor cold."

Actually, it's just a minor cold.

I try and add hyperbole to the situation by going, "I got GTI, which is a rare Nepali disease," and try and make it a serious thing.

And then Jimmy just quickly takes it away from me and goes, "Actually, it's just a cold."

So that then again just breaks that tension. It gives us some comic relief, hopefully gives a laugh or two.

I hope we're more or less at the halfway mark of the film by now.

I would like to note that this is our longest Beast philanthropy video to date, totaling the amount of 10 minutes and 3 seconds.

That's our longest film by at least like a minute and 45 seconds or something like that, which is great.

The goal with Beast philanthropy videos is to try and get them to be longer and longer and longer and longer, but obviously, they've got to be engaging.

But for a community of this size, there are often far more serious situations that required an immediate and comprehensive treatment that just are not available.

With so much riding on this project, the team were already feeling the intense pressure.

So while I got some rest, they continued with the construction.

You could begin installing the solar.

Hard work.

We were now ahead of schedule, so Darren took the...

We had that comedic break at the 4 minute 18 mark, and now the hallway up until the 5 minute mark, we've added in that intensity.

We've added in that urgency.

We've reignited the story by going, "We really needed to act fast," because from going from my GTI, which isn't, you know, obviously a rare Nepali disease, and it's not that serious, Jimmy then speaks to how there are much more severe cases, reminding the audience of the first character that we met named Nera and the severity of her case.

And that we need to get this project done in time.

One, because obviously we need medical attention as soon as possible, but two, we had also planned a big lighting ceremony that was going to happen two days after this.

So it was super important that everything gets done in time because the community people were going to travel for 8, 9, 10 hours to come and watch this lighting ceremony and see this hospital lit up for the first time.

Then what ended up happening in that day is the team worked really hard.

Not me, because I was sleeping because I was so severely ill, but the team worked super hard and was able to actually get ahead of schedule.

You can see the hospital behind Sanjay here as he sits down and how it's transforming.

And this gives us a moment within the film to then go back to Sanjay and find out more about his story.

Because what we found out when we were there was such a compelling element to Sanjay, who works for Give Power, a program that literally gives solar power to places all around the world that we've worked with multiple times before.

He's also an incredible engineer, and this is his story.

This is what he's done, and I needed to find a place to put this in the film, and this felt really fitting to put that in here.

When I was working and repeating the communes in Upper Himalayas, we found out this village with no electricity at all.

And then when you get here, I saw a baby was there in a wooden box, you know, and then there was a light bulb on, you know, hitting it.

Obviously, the animated scene here is used because we don't have the stock footage of this.

Therefore, because we've done two animations prior to this, this animation would make sense to do it.

Yet if it was just suddenly one animation and it was obvious, it just wouldn't fit in.

And yeah, it wouldn't feel right.

We would then just have him speaking to the camera directly here in order to emphasize what he's saying and help the audience imagine what he's speaking about.

It would make sense to have this animation.

That's why we have this animatic where it is.

It popped my mind, and I think this kind of equipment can be, you know, built by ourselves.

And after that, I formed a team out here in Nepal, and then we were able to make a baby warmer, and we call it Nano Nani in Nepali.

That means a warm child.

Nano Nani became such a success that it won People's Choice in the USA.

I think it's a dream come true for me because the vision is like to now build this kind of warmer and then to make people aware of the significance in remote settings and the remote hospital like this in the background, realizing the life-saving importance of simple...

I'll just like to note there, remember that in the beginning when we met Sanjay, you heard the same soundtrack.

That soundtrack was then brought back there.

Medical equipment.

Darren decided to surprise Sanjay by buying 10 more baby warmers that he could give to other communities in similar needs.

Sanjay, I want to buy another 10 of those baby warmers from you and let you just go give it to whatever hospitals or communities need them.

Thank you very much.

That means a lot for me and the team.

It feels unreal.

Those moments that happened there where Darren and Jimmy spontaneously give away additional charitable donations, I call honey pot moments in the film.

And these can also be peppered throughout the film.

These are the surprising elements, these extra elements that also reignite the flame that you didn't know were going to happen in the film.

They're surprising, and they keep you feeling good as well as they keep this idea, which happens in all the films, which is that there's always some additional surprise waiting to happen.

Now this final scene is the big scene.

It's the... with only one day remaining.

This is my favorite soundtrack out of the whole piece, and you're going to hear how it builds and builds and builds and builds, and it just breaks into this beautiful...

So this is almost like, in a way, kind of works together like a music video along with this beautiful imagery as well as this really deep and rich storytelling.

So I'm just going to play the scene out, and this scene is our longest scene because it takes us from the beginning.

And this is how you get a really powerful crescendo: how long can you really hold on to the motif?

How long can you really hold the audience there until we can then take you to a point and hit this crescendo and keep you up there and keep you high?

If the buildup isn't as long, the drop of the track or the climatic elements of the track don't hit as hard.

This goes intention, obstacle, intention, obstacle, intention, obstacle, intention, obstacle.

Are you ready?

3, 2, 1.

Boom!

With only one day remaining, we were so close to finishing.

The whole team gathered to sign the final solar, and Darren had the honor of tightening the final go.

Together, we turned a broken building with no electricity into a fully operational hospital that will service over 16,000 people in this community.

I have so much gratitude for the fact that we are able to come in here and give them a gift that will make a meaningful difference to these people for generations to come.

It's getting close to night for now, and it's nearly time to surprise the community, and I can't wait.

The whole village came to their hospital to witness the lights turn on for the first time.

Are you ready?

2, 1.

Seeing the lights come on for the first time in a community, it never gets old.

And it's been absolutely incredible sharing it with this community.

The next, again, just the goosebump scene that happens.

This is the goosebumps that you want to feel.

Like, you really want to draw this out, and then he gives the moment for Darren to be able to communicate.

Lights come on for the first time in a community.

It never gets old, and it's been absolutely incredible sharing it with this community.

Celebratory.

And now we can still keep you there, and we've got another surprise, which is the moment where we bring Nera back to the hospital so she can experience what the new hospital looks like.

So she knows that other women in her community most likely won't have to face what she went through.

That's what you call a storybook ending.

It really brings you from cover to cover, introducing her and then kind of ending with her.

But because we know from these other honey pots that have happened throughout the film, it might not be the end of the film.

There might still be one more surprise.

Invited Nera back to the hospital so he could show her all of the new equipment, including his baby warmers.

Now she's very much optimistic that no one has to go through what she went through.

She's very happy and grateful for the birthing facility over here.

Okay, so here, technically, where it should be the end of the film, we've got a brand read.

Okay, that has to happen. Just like I had a brand read in this video, the brand reads have to happen.

The brand reads in Beast philanthropy videos, 100% of the proceeds from the brand reads, from any ad revenue, from merch sales, any income stream, go back into the projects that we are doing.

So building the hospital, powering the hospital, they go to building the orphanages, they go back into the upkeep of previous projects, they go into the food bank.

There's so many places.

Without the views that these videos get, without the brand reads that these videos get, we won't be able to do the amazing projects that we do.

Yes, it is difficult to obviously have to put a brand read within a video, but it is what it is.

I'm going to skip through this brand read because it's kind of irrelevant.

This is also a reason to bring in that honey pot ending because we've got the brand read, and we need the AV to want to stretch the ho to the end of the video.

That's why we utilize this final surprise, and there's always a final surprise at the end of every Beast philanthropy video.

That's why you need to stay to the end of every video, and this is what we decided to do for the final surprise, which was awesome, by the way.

Hey, let's get back into it.

When speaking to Sanj, we found out that although he is Nepali, he has never been to Everest, and it has always been a dream of his to see the massive mountain.

So in the last morning, we decided to surprise him with a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

We're so close to Everest; it just made sense that we go visit it.

We took Sanj to the highest point on Everest that a helicopter could reach.

The air was so thin, Darren and San were only allowed to, like, minute up there where they can get...

HXY of Black Box.

Darren and I are at the highest point we've ever been together.

I can't believe this is happening.

Seeing Everest literally brought San to his knees with emotion.

It's so overwhelming.

It's a dream for me to come here, and again, I just want to thank our partners at Give Power.

And yeah, I mean, even for me watching that, it almost brings me to tears because it just reminds me of how incredible these opportunities are to go and experience these things.

Being behind the camera and editing it really adds this shield.

Just the ability to witness that is like, that's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I don't think I'll ever be able to experience something like that again, and I'm just so grateful to Jimmy and Darren and to be able to see things like that.

And seeing Sanjay just fall down to his knees and experience such a beautiful moment is kind of like this high power moment for Sanjay.

It was really something very special to witness.

So we get there, and this is now where the persuasion gets involved.

Remember where I spoke about impact, communication, persuasion?

I'll act of persuasion.

Persuasion sounds like a negative word.

Impact communication, transformation rather, and but that is a persuasive act to transform.

And this is where we would ask the audience to either donate or to get involved or just thank the audience for their support or to subscribe or like because all of those things all snowball.

The more views we get, the more subscribers we get, the more the brands are going to pay for the videos, the more money we make off YouTube, and the more good that we can do.

So that's a kind of a thing that's repeated by Jimmy at the end of all of these videos.

He did shout me out at the end of this video, which is fantastic.

I don't need to play the whole outro, but yeah, you get what happens at the end.

Just before finishing off and going into how I grade these videos, I just wanted to touch on why this timeline looks like this, and it looks all colorful and all over the place.

It's like that on purpose, and it's planned that way.

It's because we can see how much screen time each character is getting.

For instance, all Jimmy's VO is orange like this, or Jimmy to camera is light blue like that.

All Darren is green, all the yellow stuff is animation, all Dan, me, is dark blue, etc., etc.

So that just helps understand when going through this timeline, and obviously, then this helps correlate with the script.

So if you quickly want to go somewhere, you can quickly go through here and figure out where you are on the script.

Look how beautiful and pretty the timeline looks.

So now we're going to go into the grade and how this is done.

For the grade, I really don't do anything too extensive because all the footage is shot in Sony S-Log 3, as mentioned before in the shooting scene.

So I simply add a conversion LUT, which converts my footage into Rec. 709, and this is the LUT I use.

It's from an incredible YouTuber called Danny Gitt. If you don't know his work, I suggest going over and checking it out. It's awesome, by the way.

I didn't get endorsed to say that.

And if everything is shot to the correct exposure and white balance, this LUT does most of the work.

So once the conversion LUT is applied, I simply add some contrast and saturation to boost the colors.

I found that the audience reacts best to a color palette that pops.

I do this for every single clip in the film to make sure that every frame is graded and is well balanced.

Next part is really important, and that is mixing the sound and the music so that you can actually hear what's being said and as well as amplify certain sound effects in certain areas and bring them down in certain areas, as well as bring the music up in certain areas, bring the music down in certain areas, etc., etc.

So here's a really quick way of how to do it.

Premiere Pro has made audio mixing really easy with all their new AI updates.

Remember that the vocals are most important, music then comes second, and then sound effects.

So then what you're going to do is open up the central sound panel, then select the audio you need in the mix.

Like I said, I always start off with the vocals.

Make sure you then select dialogue in the essential sound window and click enhance.

And once it is finished enhancing, you just have immediately better sounding audio.

Then make sure this vocal enhancer box is ticked, and then finally for the vocals, adjust a gain so it sits around the -9 to -12 dB range.

This will ensure that the audio will not be peaking when playing back.

A few months ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain in a remote part of Nepal, this hospital looked like this.

A few months ago, at the very top of a 9,000-foot mountain in a remote part of Nepal, this hospital looked like this.

I do this for all the vocals in the entire film, and then I move on to the music.

For the music, I always duck it against the vocals, meaning that the music will never overpower the vocals to the point where you will not be able to hear what is being said vocally.

And then for the music, I set the gain to around -2 dB, but again, this changes in points where I really want the music to elevate a scene.

For example, the crescendo scene, a climatic scene.

Are you ready?

2... [Applause]

1.

Seeing the lights come on for the first time in a community, it never gets old, and it's been absolutely incredible sharing it with this community.

So the music can really be heard here and experienced so that the audience can feel the emotion.

I again do this for all the music in the film.

I do this all before finally mixing in the sound effects and ambience.

These elements are simply there to help support the audio.

Again, if there are some moments that need to be elevated, I then up the gain of the sound effects to help with this.

Usually with time-lapse scenes and when we transition from one day to another, I do this for all of the sound design of the entire video.

Step eight: packaging and delivery.

And finally, I'm just going to show you the export settings that I use.

It's super simple to best optimize your export for YouTube at 4K so that the viewer has the best possible time they can have watching the video.

This is what I have found to be the best way to export a video for YouTube.

I make sure that I export the film into the final export folder, as I mentioned when going through the drive setup.

In this folder, I have two folders: one 4K for YouTube, which is where the final YouTube export will go, and two, a 4K with no subtitles, which is where the clean export of the film will go.

These are the best export settings.

I always match the source of my sequence. The format is also always H.264.

Then I tick these two boxes: render at maximum depth and use maximum render quality.

All of the other settings stay the same, but I make sure that the bit rate is set to 40 Mbps per second and VBR one pass.

Okay, then I click export, and once the film is exported, it is absolutely crucial that you watch through it multiple times.

This is called a QC, a quality check.

You have to quality check the video because you never know if there's an export error or a black frame or a piece of media that is offline.

Okay, back to Cape Town.

Step nine: the upload.

Okay, that experience was wild.

In total, the entire process of just the edit, excluding travel, I would say it took around 7 days.

This whole process of making this entire film, I would say took about a month to a month and a half.

I'm just about to click the upload button for the Beast philanthropy video, but before I do, I just wanted to say if you got this far in this tutorial, if you made it the whole way here, no matter if it took you 3 days, 5 days, a month, please let me know below because you're the kind of person that I definitely want to work with in the future.

Just the mere fact that you have the drive, the dedication to get through a tutorial that's this extensive just shows that you've really got what it takes to one day or right now become one of the greatest filmmakers on YouTube.

I'm not at all saying that this tutorial is going to turn you into the genius of editing or the genius of filmmaking, but it definitely shows you've got what it takes in order to want to learn, to grow, to expand as a filmmaker.

And I take my hat off to you.

I've never in my whole life, on every film I've ever made, worked this hard on a film or a tutorial.

It's been one hell of a process.

Usually, I'm just sitting doing this whole thing without having to talk and explain to the camera at the same time while going along in the process.

So technically, it took double as long, or I had to consider what I was saying the whole time too.

So yeah, it was a lot of work.

Therefore, a mere share or a like or a comment would mean the world.

Also, if you're new here, please subscribe and turn your notifications bell on.

And then lastly, the only thing that got me through was Brew Bar.

Um, you can buy a box of Brewbar. There's 12 in a box. I'll link it below.

Definitely just buy Brewbar. It is the greatest tasting caffeinated healthy snack on the market by miles. I don't know why it hasn't taken over the world yet, but anyway, you can help that become a reality.

Okay, just about to click upload.

Okay, just about to click upload. There we go. As it's uploading, don't forget you're awesome, Brew, and I'll see you soon.