How to Get Organized: Why?

Before I get to anything super technical about how to work with the hardware and software you'll need to master in order to get really good at media production, I want to take a minute and talk about getting organized . 

In the immortal words of (food science nerd, television host and form commercial video director) Alton Brown:

"Organization will set you free."

I could not agree more.  

Getting organized will save you time, it will save you hassle, it will save you money, and it will increase your productivity in ways you cannot even imagine. I'm often asked how I'm able to produce so much content and work as quickly and effectively as I do... and the answer is all about organization. 

Every system I have for managing my equipment and my projects serves the single purpose of making my life easier. I know where everything is, I have easy-to-remember and easy-to-use naming conventions, I build project templates when working on recurring products, and I will frequently take a little time up-front to do certain types of work that will save me tons of time later on down the road.

All of these things are designed to enable me to spend as much of my time as possible making creative decisions about how to write, shoot & edit, and as little time as possible figuring out the structure and logistics of what I'm about to do. Every media production job is messy, unpredictable, and stressful enough as it is... Adding to that chaos by being disorganized is a recipe for disaster, and the best way I know of to force yourself into making tons of stupid mistakes, producing a poorer quality product, and taking far longer than you'd ever want to spend trying to fix everything you could have gotten right in the first place.

With this set of tutorials, I'm going to show you how I organize my gear & how I pack one of my travel bags; how I organize my project folders, the files within those folders, and the various clips and layers within various media production projects; and I'm going to show you how to save precious time by creating re-usable templates for your videos.

But most importantly, what I hope to accomplish here, is to get you to think about how you organize your process, so that you can work more professionally and consistently.

Stay tuned.