Thing one. A sound editor uses a computer tool to fix three Hungarian vowel sounds for Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.

Thing two. A director types a prompt and a machine generates every single pixel and voice for a short horror film from scratch.

Both of these get the exact same label - “AI”.

And because they get the same label, people panic at the first one.

When the news broke about The Brutalist, the internet called the acting fake. They called it slop. They argued it should not win awards.The director had to come out and explain that the actors did the acting. The machine just helped them pronounce a few letters. But the headline was already out there.

This is the problem we are running into as creators.

We use a massive, terrifying buzzword to describe a very small, boring task. You use a tool to remove background noise from your microphone. Someone asks if you used AI. You say yes. Suddenly you are part of the great creative apocalypse. You used a noise reduction plugin. The fix is simple.

Stop using the buzzword. Start describing the actual job.

Did a machine generate the image? Say that.

Did a machine help you fix a bad audio recording? Say that.

Did a machine mix two singing voices so the actor could hit a higher note, like they did in Emilia Perez? Say that.

Specificity builds trust. Vague buzzwords build panic.

People are not actually angry at tools. They are angry at being tricked. When you tell them exactly what the tool did, the panic usually disappears.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time digging into this exact problem for my new YouTube video.

I broke down five movies and a television show to see what the machines actually did. From fixing one vowel to generating an entire scene.

The video is in production and will be available soon on my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@shaggyrec

Warmly,

AL.

P.S. Knowing which tools actually save your video and which ones just ruin it is half the battle. The full editing and color pipeline lives in the mini course.

I published my first YouTube video on Tuesday.

Four views. Zero clicks on the thumbnail.

I changed the cover to test. We’ll see. But I want to talk about the filming, because that’s where the real mistake was.

The video is about the history of sound in cinema. 1927. The whole story. And I wanted it to look good. Really look good. So I did what any reasonable person does when they want a video to look good.

I turned my own flat into a logistics problem.

Despite filming entirely at home, I kept changing locations. Every few minutes. New angle. New setup. New props. Drag things here. Move things there. Set up. Tear down. Set up again. In one apartment. Like a one man film crew having a nervous breakdown in real time.

It took several evenings. Because I still have a job as a programmer. So every night after work, I’d come home, set up a new corner, film a few lines, tear it down, and move to the next one.

I was solving a problem that didn’t exist. The viewer doesn’t care that you used nine different corners of your living room. They care whether the thing you’re saying holds their attention. I gave them a location change. They wanted a reason to stay.

So for the next video, I decided on four locations. That’s it. Each one for a specific purpose.

Three of them are in the living room. On the carpet. On the couch. Behind the table. The fourth is the bedroom with the projector.

The bedroom one is my favorite. The fog machine turns the projector beam into something solid. You can almost reach into it. It does more for the image than any of the seventeen setups I kept rebuilding all week.

Four locations. Each one ready. No dragging furniture between takes. No deciding where to stand every time. I walk to the spot. I press record. I talk.

This is the same lesson I keep relearning. The one from a few emails back. Preparation is the work. A simple video that exists is infinitely more useful than a complicated one that takes several evenings to film.

I made the complicated one. It took several evenings. It got four views.

You can watch it here if you’re curious:

Next video will be about AI. Since everyone has opinions. But this time, four locations. That’s the whole production design.

Warmly,
AL.

P.S. The full filming pipeline, from choosing your locations to the final color, lives in the mini course. Four locations included.

Nobody reaches for the volume anymore. The feed plays silently. The captions carry the words. The image carries the mood. And the thumb decides in two seconds whether to stay or leave.

Which means your video is being experienced as a silent film. And you edited it like a podcast. Your voice carries the joke. The music carries the emotion. The pacing lives in the audio. And your viewer gets none of that. They see a person moving their mouth in a quiet room.

So the video feels flat. Not because it is bad. Because it was built to be heard, not seen.

Here is the part most creators never think about.The screen takes things from you.

Your charisma shrinks. Your meaning gets thinner. A prop that felt huge in your hands looks small on a six inch display. The energy you felt while filming arrives at half strength. The lens eats presence. Every lens does.

And this is exactly the problem theater actors solved five hundred years ago.

In theater, you project. You gesture bigger than real life. You make every expression slightly too much, because the distance between the stage and the last row eats subtlety alive. What feels exaggerated up close feels right from twenty meters away.

Your phone screen is the distance.So you do the same thing. Slightly bigger gestures. Clearer expressions. Props that read at a glance. Framing that makes the important thing undeniably big in the frame.

You are not overacting. You are compensating for the glass between you and the viewer.

And then, captions.

They are not a nice addition. They are the voice of your silent film. They are intertitles, exactly like 1927. If your viewer watches on mute and your captions are missing or tiny or buried under the like button, your video has no words. No hook. No reason to stay.

Put them in the safe zone. Make them readable. Write them like sentences, not transcriptions. One idea per line. Big enough to read without squinting.

Quick test for your next video. Watch it back with the sound completely off. Does it still make sense? Does the image carry the story? Can you follow the rhythm without hearing anything?If yes, you made a silent film that works. Add sound on top as a bonus layer.If no, it is not a sound problem. It is a storytelling problem. The image was never doing the work.

I have been making a YouTube video about the year sound arrived in cinema. 1927. Careers lived and died. And the strangest part of that story is the ending. Because we went full circle. We built cathedrals of sound. And then we all started watching on mute. Silent cinema again. We just did not notice.

The full video is coming to the channel soon.

My youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@alversuscinema

Warmly,
AL.

P.S. Visual storytelling, pacing, and the full structure from the first frame to the last cut all live in the mini course. It works with the sound on or off.

The image isn’t sharp enough. The colors aren’t cinematic enough. So the answer must be a new camera. Or a LUT pack with 47 presets you will never open.

I have been in this moment. I have spent real money in this moment.

Then one day I watched my footage back and the problem was so obvious it felt rude.

White shirt. Light grey background. I looked like a person slowly dissolving into background.

Not the camera. Not the grade. I blended into my own video.

The fix is almost offensive how simple.

Pick clothes and a background that don’t match.

Dark shirt, light wall. Light shirt, dark background. Or one bright element in a calm frame. A red jacket. A yellow mug on a neutral table. Not necesary loud. Just present. Enough to give the eye a place to land.

Remember what we covered a few emails back. Your eye follows difference. Not beauty. Not expensive gear. The thing that stands out from the thing next to it.

If you and your background are the same tone, the eye slides off you. No anchor. No reason to stay. Scroll.

So before you touch a single camera setting, do the thirty second check. Can I clearly see the main object agains the background?

If yes, film. If no, change one thing. The shirt. The wall. The angle. One swap.

This costs nothing. It takes half a minute. And yet I downloaded a lot of LUTs before I ever thought to look at what I was wearing.

The simple answer feels too small to be true. It’s true anyway.

Warmly, AL.

P.S. Clothes and background are thirty seconds of the job. The full pipeline, from picking your frame to the final color, lives in the mini course.

Here’s the whole game, in three moves.

Get off the mic inside your phone or camera. That mic, on either device, is made to capture the whole scene, so it grabs your voice, the traffic, the air conditioning, and the echo all at the same volume. Clip on any cheap lapel mic, or a little wireless one, get it close to your mouth, and you instantly sound like a person instead of a voicemail.

The room matters as much as the mic. Hard, empty rooms bounce sound around and make you sound hollow and far away. Soft rooms soak it up. Record near curtains, a sofa, a bed, a full bookshelf. The oldest trick in the book is recording inside a closet stuffed with clothes, a free vocal booth that happens to look ridiculous. Avoid bare kitchens and bathrooms. They echo like a cave.

Kill the noise you can control. The fridge. The fan. The air conditioner. The notifications. Switch them off before you hit record, not after. A hum is far harder to remove in editing than it is to simply unplug.

That’s it. That’s the lever.

And here’s the strange part. Nobody has ever watched a video and thought “wow, the sound is so clean.” Good sound is invisible. It just quietly lets people stay. Bad sound is the opposite. It’s the first thing they notice and the reason they leave.

Same idea as the wobbly gimbal from last emal. Weak craft breaks trust before you’ve said a word. Sound just breaks it the loudest.

Fix the sound, and half of your “why does this feel amateur” problem disappears on its own.

Warmly, AL.

P.S. Sound is one piece of it. The whole system, in order, is in the mini course: https://vaxa.cc/vidos/p/mini-course

The gimbal lied to me

There’s a term the film world loves: production value. It sounds like “how much you spent.” It isn’t. It’s how professionala video feels. It’s why cheap films can look expensive, and expensive ones can look cheap.

And it comes down to trust. A shot that looks controlled makes the viewer relax and hand you their attention. A shot that looks like flailing makes them scan for the exit.

Nowhere did I get this more wrong than camera movement.

Instagram convinced me “cinematic” meant “moving,” so I bought a gimbal. Then a second one, because the first didn’t move quite right. My videos looked exactly the same, just with a heavier bag. The camera gimbal I bought later lives in a drawer, recalibrating its feelings every time I change a lens.

Here’s what I’d missed. A genuinely smooth move, like a real dolly or a crane, does look expensive. But a move that’s almost smooth looks cheap. Louder than no move at all. Because a floaty, barely stabilized glide is instantly recognizable as someone reaching for a shot they couldn’t land. The reach is the tell.

Only two camera choices reliably look expensive, and both are free:

Dead still. A locked off tripod shot, nothing drifting, looks composed and confident. Stillness is a flex.

Committed handheld. Intentional movement that’s clearly a choice, not a failure to afford a tripod. Nolan shot his first film entirely handheld on purpose, so he’d never be faking the dolly shots he couldn’t pay for.

Everything in between is where cheap lives: the gimbal glide that wants to be a crane and isn’t.

So: if you can’t do a move perfectly, don’t do a mediocre version. Lock it off, or pick up the camera and mean it.

And remember what we covered previously. The eye goes to movement. Keep the camera still, and let the thing inside the frame move: the steam, the hair, the hand. Think about colors and composition.

That’s the look people call cinematic.

It was never the gimbal.

Warmly, AL.

Most phone shots feel flat for one reason.
Everything sits at the same distance. You, the wall, the room — all pressed onto one layer, like a sticker on a wall. Technically fine. Completely lifeless.
The fix is depth, and it's free.
A shot feels deep and alive when it has layers. Something close to the camera. Your subject in the middle. Something far behind. Your eye reads those layers as a real space it could step into, instead of a flat picture it slides right past.

And the easiest way to get it is a foreground.
Shoot through something. A doorway. Some leaves. A railing, a shoulder, the coffee cup already sitting on the table. Let it sit soft and close to the lens while your subject stays sharp behind it.
Suddenly the same boring spot has three layers — front, middle, back — and the frame has room to breathe. It stops looking like a phone snap and starts looking like a scene.
(If this sounds familiar, good. Way back in the vertical video email I told you layers create dimension and dimension creates interest. This is that idea, grown up: you don't find depth, you build it.)

Because here's the thing:
Depth is not a lens you buy. It's a decision to put something between you and your subject.
Which — you may have noticed — is the theme of everything I teach. The eye follows difference: a decision. Colour carries feeling: a decision. Shadow gives shape: a decision. Good videos aren't made of gear. They're made of about a dozen decisions like this one, stacked on purpose.

That stack is literally what the mini-course is. The filming module alone is nothing but these decisions — foreground, light, colour, settings, lens or no lens — laid out as one system so you stop discovering them one accident at a time. The first-cohort door for readers is still open, still €29:
https://vaxa.cc/vidos/p/mini-course-exlusive

But course or no course, do today's homework, because it's the fastest win I've given you yet:
Take the most boring spot in your home. Film one shot straight on. Then find something — anything — to shoot through, and film it again. Watch them side by side.
One is a sticker. The other is a place.

Warmly, AL.
P.S. I want to see what you shot through — comments are open, weird choices encouraged. Whoever films through the most ridiculous household object wins my respect and possibly a feature next week.

For weeks now I've been ending these emails the same way. The bigger thing. Still taking shape. More on that when it's ready.

Today is when it's ready.

But let me back up, because the story matters more than the announcement.

Every week I sit down to write to you, and every week the same thing happens. I explain why focus dies on solo shoots — but there's no room for the full filming system underneath. I show you that colour is emotion — but not my actual grading workflow, the node tree, the highlights hack I've never shown anyone. I tell you the eye follows difference — but not how that becomes a hook, a script, a shot list you can actually film on a Tuesday after work.

An email can carry a principle. It can't carry a system.

So I spent the last months building a container that can.

It's called the Cinematic Creator Mini-Course, and it's the whole thing, start to finish. Seven modules: finding your cinematic niche, building an idea engine so you never stare at a blank screen again, turning ideas into hooks and shot lists (20 hook types, since you keep asking), the full filming process — phone or camera, settings, S-Log, lenses, all of it — building a character and style people actually recognize, my complete editing and colour workflow in DaVinci, and finally how cinematic creators actually earn. No viral promises. You know me better than that by now.

If these emails are the principle, this is the system. Lifetime access, work at your own pace, everything I know in one place instead of scattered across your inbox one Sunday at a time.

Now, the honest part, because I refuse to become the kind of person we make fun of here:

This is not a magic formula. There is no "post this, get 1M views" slide. If you want results without filming and practicing, please don't buy this — you'll be disappointed, and I'll be annoyed. It gives you structure. You still have to create.

And you don't need a camera. The phone in your pocket is enough to start. I've already lectured you about this at length.

Here's the part that's just for you.

When the course opens to everyone, it costs €89. But you were here before it existed. Some of you literally voted on what went into it. So for this list, while the first cohort is open, it's €29 — through this door only:

Your link: https://vaxa.cc/vidos/p/mini-course-exlusive

That's the same course, same lifetime access, same everything. Just the price for people who were reading when it was still "the bigger thing."

No countdown timers, no fake scarcity. Just first cohort, first readers, first price. When the cohort closes, the door does too.

No homework this week. The homework is the course.

Warmly,
AL.

P.S. On the fence? Reply to this email and ask me anything about it. What's in a module, whether it fits your niche, whether it's right for where you are. I read and answer everything. That's kind of the whole point of this place.

Beginners try to light everything.

Kill every shadow, brighten every corner, make it all even — and then stand there wondering why the shot looks flat.

I know this because I did it for an embarrassingly long time. More light, more evenness, more nothing. My face was fully visible in every frame and somehow that was exactly the problem.

Because here's the thing nobody tells you when you buy your first light:
Shadow is not a mistake. Shadow is the point.

It's what gives a face shape, a room depth, a shot its mood. The dark part of the frame is doing just as much work as the lit part. Flat, even light has nowhere to hide and nothing to feel.

Don't take my word for it. Open any shot that feels cinematic to you — actually go look, I'll wait.

Half the face in light, half falling into shadow. A room where the corners go dark. A window glowing on one side and the rest of the frame sinking away. That contrast is what makes it feel rich instead of like something you'd hand to a border officer.

(This should sound familiar by now. Two weeks ago: the eye goes to difference, and sameness makes it wander off. Flat light is sameness. Light-against-dark is the strongest difference there is. Same rule, third week running, still undefeated.)

So stop rushing to fill every shadow.

Let one side of the face fall off into dark. Let part of the frame sink into black. When you set up your next shot, don't ask "what else needs light?" — ask "what should stay dark?" Then protect the shadows instead of erasing them.

Because that's the actual difference:

Amateurs add more light. People who know what they're doing decide where the darkness goes.

Homework, and this one costs you nothing.

Tonight, set up your usual talking shot — then turn off, or move, whatever light is filling in the second half of your face. One take with everything lit. One take with one side allowed to go dark.

Watch them back to back. One of them looks like you. The other one looks like a film about you.

Warmly,
AL.

P.S. Send me the before/after if you dare — comments are open. And with this one, you now have the full set: where the eye goes, what colour makes it feel, and where the darkness lives. If it seems like I'm building toward something… you're paying attention. More soon.

Last week we established that your eye has terrible taste — it snaps to whatever moves or stands out, meaning be damned.
Today, the second half of that story. Because once the eye lands somewhere, something else quietly takes over.
Colour.
It's the thing I get asked about most, so let's talk about what it actually does.
Colour is not decoration. Colour is emotion. Before anyone reads your caption or hears a word, the colour has already told them how to feel. Warm tones feel safe and close. Cold tones feel calm, or lonely, or far away. You feel a frame before you understand it.

Here's the mistake almost everyone makes: they use colour like a label. Red means danger. Blue means sad. That's the most boring version of colour, because everyone already expects it.
The interesting part is that colour means whatever you decide it means.
If every calm moment in your videos is warm and gold, that becomes your calm. If your quiet moments are always cold blue, people start to feel it coming before anything happens. You're not decorating frames anymore — you're teaching your audience your own language.

So stop asking "what colour looks nice here?"
Start asking "what do I want them to feel here?" — then pick the colour that carries it.
That's where a real look comes from. Not a filter. A feeling you chose on purpose.

And the biggest colour decision isn't in your editing app

It's the temperature of your light. It quietly runs the whole mood, and most people never think about it once.
Warm light — the golden kind — feels safe, close, like a memory. Cool light — the blue kind — feels calm, or lonely, or a little cold. Same room. Same face. Change the temperature and you've changed how the moment feels before anything happens in it.

You already live with this, by the way. Morning sun through a window is warm. A phone screen in a dark room is cold. Streetlights at night are that orange hum.

Your eyes read those temperatures instantly — and so does everyone watching your videos.
Here's the useful part: pick the feeling first. If a moment should feel warm and human, lean into warm light and let it glow. If it should feel distant or quiet, let it go cool. Fighting the temperature is why a shot sometimes feels off even when you can't say why — the light is telling one story while the scene tells another.
(And yes — this is the same lesson from the color grading email, back again in a different hat. Light isn't one department of good video. It's most of them.)
Your homework this week doesn't even require a camera.
Just start noticing the temperature of light around you all day. The kitchen in the morning. The office at 3pm. The bar at midnight. Name each one — warm or cool — and notice what it does to the feeling of the room.
Then, tonight, open your last video and ask the harder question: what is the colour saying — and is it what the moment meant?

Once you feel the difference, you'll never light a shot by accident again.
Warmly, AL.

P.S. I want to hear the weirdest one you catch — the room where the light completely disagrees with the mood. Drop it in the comments. (And the bigger thing I keep hinting at? Colour has a whole chapter in it. That's all I'm saying for now.)

Which leads to the useful part:

A tiny bit of movement beats a beautiful still shot for attention. Every single time.

Steam curling off a coffee. Hair moving in the wind. A slow hand. A curtain breathing near an open window. The eye goes straight there — not because it means anything, but because it moved.

This is also why a perfectly composed, perfectly still shot can feel strangely dead. Nothing moves, so the eye has no anchor, wanders off, and takes the viewer with it. And it's why a frame with ten things moving at once feels like noise — the eye can't decide where to land, so it gives up and scrolls.

You don't even need a moving camera for this. Lock the shot on a tripod, keep everything else calm, and let one thing move inside the frame. That alone makes it feel alive.

Now — here's where it gets bigger than movement.

Your eye doesn't care about beautiful. It cares about difference.

Movement is just one flavor of a much larger rule. Your eye is pulled toward difference, in every form:

Bright against dark. Sharp against soft. Still against moving. One bright color sitting in an otherwise calm frame.

Difference grabs the eye. Sameness lets it rest.

Which finally explains two things creators quietly panic about.

A "boring" shot is usually not ugly. It's just all sameness — nothing stands out, so there's nothing for the eye to grab onto, and people scroll past something that was technically fine.

A "messy" shot is the exact opposite. Everything is shouting at once, all of it competing, and the eye has nowhere to land. Also a scroll.

Good shots pick one thing to stand out and keep everything else calm. That's basically the whole trick. (Remember "one bright color in a calm frame" from the guide? This is the why sitting underneath it.)


So here's your homework, and it takes about thirty seconds.

Tonight, open your last video and ask one question: what's the most different thing in the frame — the brightest, the sharpest, or the only thing moving — and is it what I actually wanted people to look at?

If the answer is yes: good. You were directing attention on purpose.

If the answer is "…the exit sign in the background," well. There's your fix.

Warmly,
AL.

P.S. Tell me what you find — drop it in the comments. I want to know how many of you discover your viewers have been quietly staring at a lamp this whole time. (And the bigger thing I hinted at last time? Still taking shape. Getting closer.)

Me.

I set up the tripod, frame the shot, press record, walk into frame, deliver my lines to a small piece of glass with the emotional warmth of a hostage video, walk back, watch it, dislike it, and do it again. Eleven times. Occasionally in public, where strangers observe with the particular pity reserved for a grown man talking to furniture.

If that sounds familiar — good. If it sounds horrifying — also good. It means you haven’t started yet, and I’m about to make it considerably less terrible.

Because here’s the part nobody admits: filming yourself is a skill, not a personality trait. Nobody is born comfortable in front of a lens. The people who look natural on camera are simply people who have been awkward on camera many more times than you have.

Let me save you a few hundred of those takes.

1. Frame for where you’ll be, not where you are

The first problem reveals itself the second you try this: you can’t see the frame while you’re standing in it.

So stop guessing. Mark your spot. Put something where you’re going to stand or sit — a chair, a water bottle, your shoe, anything — and build the frame around that. Leave a little headroom. Keep yourself near the center line (your eyes drift to the middle in vertical video — we’ve been here before). Then remove the object and take its place.

And frame slightly wider than you think you need. A bit of breathing room means you can reframe later in editing, instead of discovering in post that your forehead has been evicted from the shot.

2. Focus is the silent killer

Nothing ruins a solo shoot faster than a gorgeous, razor-sharp 4K video of the wall behind you, while your face sits in a soft, dreamy blur.

Two ways to win this:

The lazy way, which I use: eye-detection autofocus. Modern cameras lock onto a face and follow it around. Switch it on, trust it, get on with your life.

The reliable way: manual focus with a stand-in. Put an object exactly where your face will be, focus on it by hand, then swap yourself in without nudging the tripod. Done.

And one quiet insurance policy — close your aperture down a little. Shooting wide open at f/1.2 looks cinematic right up until you lean two centimeters forward and lose focus completely. A slightly deeper depth of field is far more forgiving when there’s nobody behind the camera to pull focus for you.

3. Talking to a lens without sounding like a ransom note

This is the part that makes people quit before they begin.

A few things that genuinely help:

Talk to one person. Not “an audience.” One specific human who would actually enjoy what you’re saying. The lens is their face. (This is the same trick that makes writing clearer — crowds make you vague, one person makes you human.)

Burn the first take on purpose. Your first attempt is always stiff. Always. Treat it as a warm-up you fully intend to delete, and the pressure quietly evaporates.

Stop watching yourself in the flip screen while recording. Watching yourself perform is the fastest possible route to looking like you’re performing. Look at the lens, or just past it, and behave as if you’re mid-conversation.

Move. Use your hands. Start talking before you feel ready. Stiffness comes from holding still and waiting to “be good.” Energy covers a multitude of sins.

4. How do you know it’s working if you’re standing in front of it?

You monitor.

The simplest method: most cameras — and your phone — connect to a companion app, so you can prop your phone next to the tripod and watch yourself live. Sony has one; your phone does it natively.

No app? Shoot a 10-second test take first. Check all four things — framing, focus, exposure, sound — fix whatever’s broken, then film for real. One minute of testing beats discovering forty minutes later that your mic was never on.

After that, stop pixel-peeping between every take. Film a few, then review them in a batch. Inspecting each one obsessively is precisely how a 30-second video becomes an afternoon.

The pattern underneath all of this is the same one I keep dragging you back to: filming gets easier when you remove the decisions before you press record — not while you’re standing in frame, sweating, improvising.

Mark the spot. Lock the focus. Test once. Talk to one person. Press record and commit.

The crew of one gets a lot less painful once it knows what it’s doing.

Looking back, it became the apple of discamera.

(I’ll see myself out😅)

Like many creators, I was convinced that somewhere between my iPhone and cinematic greatness stood a Sony camera…

Here’s the reality...

Both phones and cameras are excellent tools. They simply solve different problems.

✅ Phones are ridiculously convenient.

✅ They’re always with you.

✅ They have great stabilization, surprisingly good image quality, and allow you to shoot, edit, and post from the same device.

✅ There is almost no friction between having an idea and publishing a video.

And friction matters. The easier it is to create, the more likely you are to keep creating.

Of course, phones have limitations.

❌ You’re restricted in terms of lenses

❌ low-light performance

❌ depth of field

❌ and camera settings

❌ the footage can sometimes look overly processed,

❌ and if you’re shooting a lot, battery and storage become permanent enemies.

This is where cameras start winning.

✅ A good camera gives you better image quality, especially in difficult lighting conditions.

✅ You gain access to different lenses

✅ better control over focus and exposure

✅ more cinematic background blur

✅ much more flexibility if you’re shooting professionally or working with clients.

Unfortunately, cameras also come with a small side effect: they make your life more complicated.

❌ They’re expensive.

❌They’re heavier.

❌They require batteries, memory cards, file transfers, backups, and a surprising number of decisions.

It’s very easy to spend more time preparing to create than actually creating.

Which brings us to the question everyone asks:

Should you buy a camera?

My answer is surprisingly simple.

If you know exactly why you need one — buy one.

If you’re constantly fighting low light, need specific lenses, shoot for clients, record long sessions, or want complete creative control over your image, a camera will absolutely help.

But if your reason is simply “I want my videos to be better,” I’d wait.

Because the most expensive mistake creators make is solving a problem they don’t actually have yet.

Most people don’t need a camera.

Most people need better ideas, better storytelling, better lighting, better audio, and more consistency.

The good news is that all of those things can be improved with the phone already sitting in your pocket.

Start with the tool you already have.

Upgrade when the limitation becomes obvious.

Not when YouTube convinces you that happiness is one Sony purchase away.

For years I had a very simple theory about cinematic footage.

Somewhere out there, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Roger Deakins and a few other people were sitting around a table, secretly discussing color grading settings they refused to share with the rest of us. This theory explained a lot. Why their movies looked incredible and why my videos looked… considerably less incredible.

Maybe the problem was me. (doubt it) So I did what every aspiring creator does. I downloaded LUTs. I watched tutorials. I spent hours moving sliders left and right with the confidence of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

And then one day I accidentally discovered that the biggest difference between amateur footage and cinematic footage usually isn’t color grading at all.

It’s what happened before the color grading.

You see these two frames. Same location. Same me. Same camera. Even the exact same color grade in DaVinci.

And yet — one looks tired. Flat. Slightly disappointing.

The other looks cinematic and...alive?

Why?

Here’s the part that ruins the romance:

In the second frame, I used proper light. That’s it. What a shocker, right? 😁

Color grading starts long before you open your editing software. It starts when you decide where to stand, where the light is coming from, and what exactly you’re putting into the frame.

One mistake I see all the time is people treating a shot as a flat image. Subject in the middle, background behind them, done.

But cinematic images usually have depth. Try building your frame in layers: something in the foreground, your subject in the middle, and the background behind them. Suddenly the image feels less like a screenshot and more like a place you could actually walk into.

The second thing is light direction.

Most beginners put light directly in front of themselves because it feels safe. Unfortunately, safety is rarely cinematic. Try moving the light 45 or even 90 degrees to the side. Better yet, film from the shadow side. Side light creates contrast, shape and texture. It gives faces dimension.

And here’s the beautifully simple logic:

Bright colors are easy to darken.

Dark, underexposed colors are much harder to rescue.

When you add light, you expand your possibilities in post-production.

When you don’t, you spend hours trying to save what was never really there.

This is also why people shoot in log slightly overexposed.

Yes, it looks too bright.

Yes, it feels wrong at first.

But look at the waveform. When the image is slightly overexposed, you have a wide range to work with. So much data. So many options.

Now look at an underexposed image. The graph sinks. The lower values collapse. Information disappears.

And once color information is gone, it doesn’t come back because you politely asked.

Technically, this is simplified. But imagine the histogram sliding down and crushing everything at the bottom. That’s what underexposure does. It quietly steals your future flexibility.

And this doesn’t apply only to artificial light indoors.

When shooting outside, always search for good light. Side light, not backlight. Texture, not silhouette. Depth, not struggle.

You don’t fix bad light with color grading. You fix bad light with better light.

The perfect color grade isn’t a preset.

It’s preparation.

And while we’re talking about things people forget: cinematic footage is only half the story.

A surprising amount of “cinematic feeling” comes from sound.

Footsteps. Clothes moving. A coffee cup touching a table. Wind. City ambience. A door closing somewhere in the background.

Most people spend hours tweaking colors and then leave the original camera audio untouched.

Meanwhile a few layers of thoughtful sound design can make even a simple shot feel expensive.

You can record sounds yourself, use libraries like Artlist or Epidemic Sound, or even free resources like Pixabay. The source matters less than the fact that you thought about sound at all.

Because people watch with their eyes, but they experience with their ears too.

You don’t fix bad light with color grading.

You don’t fix a flat frame with a LUT.

And you definitely don’t fix silent footage with saturation.

The perfect color grade isn’t a preset.

It’s preparation.

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At this point I’ve shared a respectable amount of both wisdom and suffering, which made me curious: how many aspiring video creators are actually reading these emails?

If that’s you, reply and tell me what you shoot, what drives you insane, and whose videos make you think, “Damn, I wish I’d made that.”

I’m genuinely curious who’s hiding behind these email addresses. 😄

When I started posting videos, I assumed that if people commented, they would comment on the videos. The camera. The editing. The storytelling. Things that were actually present in the content. What I didn’t anticipate was that many people would use the comment section as an opportunity to reveal something about themselves instead.

A few weeks ago I made a video where I was pretending to talk to my mother. At one point she “tells” the audience to follow me. It was a joke. Not particularly sophisticated. Not even one of my better jokes. Yet one of my favorite comments to this day is the one you’ll see below.

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The longer I make videos, the more I notice that people don’t really watch content objectively. They bring themselves into it. Their experiences, insecurities, memories, assumptions, and occasionally complete misunderstandings.

For example, in one video I deliberately pointed at bright red text and confidently referred to it as yellow. The joke seemed obvious enough to me. What followed was several days of people sincerely questioning whether they were becoming colorblind. One comment in particular made me laugh so hard that I had to save it.

This is when I started realizing that the audience isn’t passively consuming content. They’re participating in it. They’re filling in the blanks. They’re arguing with it. Sometimes they’re arguing with things that aren’t even there.

Which brings me to perhaps my favorite example. I once made a video about text colors. That’s it. Typography. A thrilling topic if you’re a designer and a completely harmless one if you’re not. At one point I explained that black text would look worse in a particular example.

Somehow this resulted in the following comment.

I spent a few minutes wondering how exactly a discussion about typography had evolved into an accusation of racism. Then I remembered where I was.

The internet is the only place on earth where thousands of people can watch the same 30-second video and leave with thousands of completely different interpretations of what happened. One person sees a joke. Another sees an insult. One person thinks you’re intelligent. Another thinks you’re an idiot. A third person thinks you’re secretly part of a conspiracy that neither of you knew existed ten minutes earlier.

The last one below remains my favorite of all times.

The comment says:

“What AI tool are you using?”

And I replied:

“Believe it or not… I’m just changing clothes.”

That’s such a perfect example of people not seeing what is actually happening in front of them. They’re seeing what they’ve already decided must be happening.

And that’s probably the weirdest side effect of visibility. People don’t become emotionally attached to the creator. They become emotionally attached to their interpretation of the creator.

The good news is that some of those interpretations are hilarious. 🤣

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Next time I will share how you can make your video cinematic with 3 easy ways.

Consider this your warning.

Warmly,

AL.

You start dissecting them like a detective with a caffeine addiction.

Why did this one explode? Why did this one die peacefully in complete silence? Why did I spend 4 hours editing a video just for people to leave after 1.3 seconds?

Eventually, after staring at Instagram analytics for an amount of time that probably qualifies as psychological self-harm, I started noticing patterns.

So here are two screenshots: one successful video and one unsuccessful one. And this is usually how I understand what went wrong and where.

Now look at this video.

Do you think it went viral?

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Probably not. The skip rate here is around 65%, which is… not great. Good videos usually stay below 50%. Very strong videos often go below 40%.

The average watch time here is around 6 seconds, while the video itself lasts 16 seconds. Again, there’s no sacred rule carved into stone tablets by the Instagram algorithm, but from observation, shorter videos usually need around 50% retention to perform really well. Longer videos can survive closer to 40%.

The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t really predict which video will go viral. Anyone confidently claiming otherwise is probably trying to sell you a course with arrows on thumbnails. But what we can do is analyze what happened after the video was posted.

And honestly, most metrics barely matter.

The two most important ones are:

• skip rate,

• and average watch time (AWT)

That’s it. That’s the whole religion.

Skip rate basically tells you how many people escaped during the first three seconds of your video. In other words: how strong your hook actually was.

Now have a look at this:

Skip rate below 40%. Retention above 50%.

That video reached 2.4 million views and brought me around 65k followers.

Painfully simple.And this is where creators often misunderstand analytics. They obsess over likes because likes feel emotional. Views feel public. Comments feel validating. But Instagram mostly cares about attention.

Can you keep people watching?

Can you stop them from escaping?

Can you make them stay slightly longer than they intended to?

That’s the game.

Shares matter too, by the way. Shared videos usually mean one of two things:

• useful,

• or relatable.

Ideally both.

Likes, honestly, are less impressive than people think. Although if absolutely nobody likes your video, Instagram interprets that as society politely asking the platform to move on.

Now, the most useful thing you can do is stop looking at analytics emotionally and start looking at them diagnostically.

Especially this graph:

This graph is basically an X-ray of your content.

If viewers leave immediately, your hook is weak.

This one:

Most likely:

• too slow,

• too confusing,

• or simply boring.

Which usually means the script needs rewriting, not “better cinematic shots.”

And if you see a dramatic drop at one specific moment, congratulations — you found the exact part people hated.

Remove it. Shorten it. Replace it. Fix the pacing. Analytics are surprisingly honest.

Sometimes brutally honest.

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Next time we’ll talk about why complete strangers suddenly feel emotionally entitled to you. Weirdest comments will be shared also 😁.

Consider this your warning.

Warmly,

AL.

A couple of months ago, if you had told me that my Instagram income would quietly become comparable to my software engineering salary, I probably would’ve smiled politely and continued debugging something.

And yet, since February, I’ve made around $25,000 from collaborations.

Not from millions of followers. Not from viral dances. Not from pretending I wake up at 5AM to meditate while sunlight gently hits my expensive kitchen.

Just from making videos.

Now, before everyone dramatically quits their jobs, there’s an important detail people don’t talk about enough: making money from content is not the same thing as enjoying the process of monetizing it.

Because collaborations are… complicated. Especially agency collaborations.

Brands are usually fine. Agencies, however, often behave as if paying for a video also gives them partial ownership over your personality, creative instincts, and occasionally basic human dignity. Suddenly everyone has opinions.

“Can we make it more dynamic?”

“Can you mention the product earlier?”

“Can we make it feel more native?”

“Can we show more features?”

“Can we make it less cinematic and more relatable but still premium?”

And before you realize it, you’re editing a video you don’t even like anymore.

Some of the worst videos I’ve ever posted were sponsored. Not because the products were bad, but because too many people were involved in “improving” them.

And honestly, that’s one of the ugliest little details of creator income nobody mentions. Sometimes the money is great, but the content feels dead by the time it gets published.

Which is exactly why this month I reduced the number of collaborations and started being more selective. I found one brand that genuinely likes the way I see their product instead of trying to reconstruct me into a completely different creator. The videos perform better, the process feels lighter, and most importantly — the content still feels like mine. Which, surprisingly, matters more than I expected.

The internet has created a fascinating generation of people who are perfectly comfortable posting themselves online every day, but become deeply uncomfortable the moment money enters the conversation.

And honestly, I understand why.

The moment you ask for money, everything suddenly feels more serious. You stop feeling like “someone who makes videos for fun” and start feeling like someone who has to justify their value.

But brands care much less about your existential crisis than you think they do.

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Here are some negotiation techniques that my marketing manager applies to get me better deals.

Usually we intentionally start with a higher rate because both sides understand there’s room for negotiation. Then comes the predictable answer:

“That’s way beyond our budget.”

And now the theatre begins.

My manager “talks to me.”

I apparently “make a generous discount.”

The brand “checks internally.”

Everyone performs their role correctly.

And surprisingly often, it works. This is called anchoring. You establish a higher psychological reference point first, so the final number feels much more reasonable by comparison.

Now, to be clear, we’re not starting at something insane like $10,000 per reel and trying to emotionally terrorize people into bankruptcy. The rates are still reasonable. Usually you can use influencer marketing platforms or calculators to roughly understand your market value and then simply test whether brands reaching out to you are comfortable with those numbers.

Because pricing is not mathematics. It’s positioning.

Brands do exactly the same thing, by the way.

Recently, one very famous tool wanted to collaborate with me. We gave them our fixed rate, and in response they sent a detailed breakdown explaining that according to my recent statistics, they would prefer a CPM + CPE compensation structure instead. In other words: “We’ll pay you depending on performance.”

Which sounds perfectly logical until you remember that social media performance is not physics.

Nobody fully controls it.

Not creators.

Not brands.

Not even the algorithm itself, despite its God complex.

So we declined. Because fixed pricing pays not only for views, but also for scripting, filming, editing, production quality, audience trust, and the years it took to build all of that in the first place.

And honestly, I think this is where many creators fail during negotiations. They try to justify themselves with numbers alone, while forgetting that brands are also paying for taste, trust, positioning, and the ability to make an ad not feel like an ad.

Which is much harder than people think.

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Next time I’ll show you how I actually read my Instagram analytics and how I slowly reverse-engineered the formula behind my best-performing videos.

Not in a “guru with arrows on thumbnails” kind of way.

I’ll show you:

• what metrics I actually pay attention to,

• which numbers matter less than people think,

• how I realized some videos fail before they even start,

• and the patterns I noticed after staring at analytics for an unhealthy amount of time.

With screenshots, examples, and a few painful realizations.

Consider this your warning.

Warmly,

AL.

I know, I know- “ What a trite phrase to say”, but it’s so damn true. You can make money with 5k followers.

My first paid collaboration came when I had around 12k followers. A client reached out asking for a reel with a tutorial of their service. I had never done a paid collab before, so I had absolutely no idea what to charge. So I googled it and ended up on Social Bluebook. It suggested something around $900.

That felt… reasonable, but also slightly off. I figured their calculator assumes a broad audience, and mine was niche, but very relevant to the brand. So instead of following the number, I asked for $1200.

They came back with $600.

And because it was my first deal, I got a bit nervous. I didn’t want to lose the opportunity, so I agreed. At the time it felt like a win. Now I understand we probably could have met somewhere around $900.

What’s interesting is that nothing about that deal required a big audience. It required the right audience and the willingness to say a number out loud.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that if I had actively reached out to brands, I could have started making money even earlier, somewhere around 5k followers. Most people don’t do that because it’s complicated, because it feels uncomfortable.

If the idea of outreach sounds time-consuming, there’s also a very simple workaround. You can hire someone to do it for you on a percentage basis. Which means you’re not really risking anything — you’re just sharing what you wouldn’t have earned otherwise.

And collaborations are not only one option. You can sell your own services — videography, coaching, design, whatever you actually know how to do. Or you can work with affiliate programs if your content gets good reach.

There are multiple ways to monetize. Most people just wait too long to start.

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After my last email, one person replied. Not a lot, but enough to remind me that behind all of this there are real people dealing with very real — and sometimes very strange — situations.

The story was simple. A client came in with a full list of requests: merch, videos, promo content, everything. They aligned on the concept, discussed visuals, agreed on timelines, even planned the shoot. On paper, it looked like a perfect collaboration.

At some point, it came down to the obvious next step: 50% upfront and final details to start production.

The client said they would send everything “in a moment.”

That “moment” stretched into a month.

And then into a loop.

Follow-up → “yes, in a bit.”
Another follow-up → “yes, in a bit.”

No rejection, no conflict, no actual progress either. Just a very polite version of nothing happening.

And I think this is the kind of situation most people run into at some point. Not a dramatic failure, not even a bad deal — just a slow, slightly absurd standstill where you’re not sure if you should keep pushing or quietly walk away.

These situations are useful in a strange way. Sometimes they teach you how to handle clients better, set boundaries, or read signals earlier. And sometimes they just become very good stories.

Ideally, both.

And if you’re the one who shared this — thank you. This is exactly the kind of thing people don’t talk about enough.

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Next time I’m gonna share how much I earn from my blog now and how to get money you want from collaborations. Also, my marketing manager will reveal some negotiation techniques to get you more money.

Consider this your warning.

Warmly,

AL.

A couple of months ago, I was approached by a company whose name I will generously withhold (let’s call them Let’s-Not-Point-the-Finger Inc.) to create a video for my account.They work in message automation. You know the pitch: comments, replies, DMs, everything answered instantly, because speed is apparently the last remaining virtue.

We discussed the details. They agreed to everything. Everything, that is, except they deeply insisted I include one particular line in the video:

“It happened to all of us — you lose a customer because you replied too late.”

I was told, with great seriousness, that this was crucial. A cornerstone. A moral truth. Practically a proverb.

No problem, I said. I illustrated it. I filmed the video. I sent it.

Their first reaction? They loved it. “Super duper,” even. Just one tiny adjustment. I did it immediately. Efficiency is my love language.

A few hours later, they came back saying the team had discussed things and decided the video should be extended so their service could be shown in a more… expansive way. Fine. At that point, the woman coordinating this assured me that half of the agreed payment had already been sent to my bank account.

Reader, it had not.

I asked a few clarifying questions. Then they disappeared. A full week. No replies. No money. Radio silence.

So I did what any reasonable person would do: I interpreted their notes myself, remade the video, edited it again, and went on my winter vacation.

A week later, they reappeared, announcing they now wanted to see a script first.

Still no money.

I politely asked whether everything was okay with the payment they said they’d sent. That’s when I was informed — very calmly — that nothing had been sent at all, because the team hadn’t approved everything yet.

This was surprising, mostly because I had been explicitly told the opposite.

Nevertheless, vacation or not, I sent a new script immediately. The manager approved it, sent it to the team, and promised to get back to me “in a jiffy.”

A week passed.

Then they wrote to say they didn’t like the new scripts at all. This was interesting, because it was essentially the same script they loved initially, just modified according to their requests.

At this stage, they insisted:

• the company name should be mentioned earlier,

• more than once

• include more details than originally planned

And with their endless tweaks they somehow managed to turn what was meant to be a collaborative, blogger‑style video into something that looked suspiciously like a

formal brand video.

I started feeling a little hesitation and discontent, but I tried to stay practical, so I assumed there would be some choices to make anyway. Here’s what they offered:

1. Use their service myself, get impressed, and create a new video based on the actual experience

2. Let them write the script, and I’d just film it.

3. Accept $100 for the time I’d already spent creating the video they currently possess.

It has now been over a month since this began.

I don’t particularly mind what happens to the video. I have options. What I do mind — or rather, what I can’t help but admire — is the irony.

This is a company built entirely around the idea that you lose customers when you reply too late, while their own replies arrive weekly, if at all, and their promises move at a glacial pace.

Which brings us to the moral, because there is always one, even when no one asked for it:

Technology doesn’t fix bad communication.

Automation doesn’t replace respect.

And no amount of instant replies will save you if you forget that real people are waiting on the other side.

Sometimes, the message answers itself.

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Now I’m curious — what’s the most absurd customer interaction you’ve had?I feel like there’s a whole collection of stories like this out there.

Reply with yours. I’m thinking of turning the best ones into a follow-up post

(anonymously, of course).

Warmly,

AL.

Hey there, colleagues!

Quick thing before we get to the juicy part. In my last email i shared quite valuable stuff about my gear and I believe due to high dosage of links it went down to promotions. Well, it wasn’t a promotion at all. So, If you missed it- don’t forget to check your promotions box.

Okay, here goes…

People often assume there was some kind of structured plan behind how I learned all of this. There wasn’t. Some things I figured out myself, mostly because I had no other option and, obviously, because I’m incredibly witty and smart 😂. I learned the basics of editing in Final Cut, Sony Vegas, and CapCut just by clicking around and watching other people’s videos. The same goes for filming. I didn’t really understand composition at the beginning. I just copied what looked good. I followed creators like nordic_scott and a few others on Instagram and tried to replicate their angles and movements without fully understanding why they worked.

At that stage, I genuinely thought I would always shoot on my phone and edit in CapCut. It was simple, fast, and most importantly, not stressful. Almost immediately, I realized I wanted better quality. And that meant learning how to use a proper camera, switching to more advanced editing software, and getting into color grading. All of that sounds intimidating when you have no idea what you’re doing, and while you can learn it on your own over time, I didn’t feel like waiting.

So I bought a course from Al Dante, they mainly create food videos, but of a very good quality. It cost five thousand dollars. A New Year’s gift to myself, which is either a bold investment or a questionable life decision, depending on your perspective. There were cheaper options, but I specifically wanted feedback form the mentor.

I went through the course quickly, and somewhere along the way, something shifted. I stopped being afraid of the camera, DaVinci Resolve stopped looking like a cockpit, and even the color grading tab became manageable. Because most of the difficulty isn’t in the tools themselves, it’s in the hesitation before you start using them.

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Next time, I’ll tell you a story about a brand that built its entire business on never replying late — and then proceeded to ghost me with the dedication of a performance artist.

Consider this your warning.

Warmly,

Al Shogenov.