From March 2022 to October 2023, I worked on a full-time basis (1 video a week) for Astro Fécond, a reaction-based YouTube channel. The channel's owner, Chris Conte, is a multi-potential YouTuber (he has four YouTube channels!) and fiction writer. To quote his YouTube banner, "let's explore the human genius together!" 👨‍🔬

An Astro Fécond video is made of a minimum of 8 "items" related to the main theme/subject of the video being reacted to and explained by Chris, followed by a "grade". ✔️

Before starting a project, I'll download the raw video(s) and have a Google Document containing the links to the items Chris is reacting to.

After that, what I had to do was usually the same for each project:

Trim down a 50-ish minute long raw video to a maximum 20-minute final reaction video,

Determine the sections with reactions,

Add zoom ins, zoom outs, left and right pans to the other sections,

Reaction sources & royalty free stock footage,

Graphics,

Subtitles if needed,

The grade,

The CTA outro,

Sound effects and appropriate royalty free music,

Finally, export and send! ✨

To streamline the process, I use a plugin to remove dead air/silence from the raw video and edit each items individually before bringing them to the main timeline for export.

My personal touch was adding pop-up images at the bottom corners of the screen to emphasize something:

And possibly, visual effects:

Once the video is validated after revisions, it's scheduled to be released and I wait for my next project! 😉

Even if the process was streamlined, finding appropriate stock footage, music and additional resources could be time consuming. 🕐

The key was good organization and time management to meet the deadline!