I Finally Did It!

I completed my first module for the course!

It’s in the middle of rendering, and while it does its thing I wanted to take the time to write about this experience.

If this is your first time learning about it, I am building a course for new and aspiring engineering managers to help transform them into confident leaders! I am building the exact course I wanted when I became a manager, to help people who like to learn with courses+videos.

I took 4 days off work this week to work on the course. I decided to produce an entire module and break up the course that way, rather than doing all the slides, all the filming, and then all the editing for the entire course.

It is nice to be in “filming mode” and there could be efficiency wins there, however I’ve never done this before. I didn’t want to film the entire thing only to realize in editing that I set myself up for failure.

I learned a lot going end-to-end with a module before committing to making ALL the slides or doing ALL the filming. I actually may do the next set of filming BEFORE I make the slides, and then make slides as I’m editing.

If I was screen recording that’s one thing, but I’m not, I’m adding the slides during editing, which makes it way easier to add different transitions and make adjustments to the slides depending on what is said.

So when will the course be done? I have no idea but here is some data!

• There are 24 slides, with some animations, resulting in 51 stills.

• I filmed this in 6 pieces, and there was 111 minutes of raw footage, and the final cut has 87 minutes (so we removed 24 minutes).

  • The resulting file is 28.44 GB. 4k baby.

• It was filmed in 2 sessions.

• The second sessions was SO much better, and the biggest impact besides quality is that the editing was about 5x faster. Many less things to cut out in post.

• My first round of editing was to remove all the “umms”, “ahhs”, the dead air where I read something, all the practices I did of a section where I then redid it, etc. This is where I made sure everything flowed together and made sense.

  • The next round was to insert all the slides in the appropriate places.

  • The next round was turning all the footage into “picture-in-picture”, and moving it around to where it made sense. I didn’t plan this in advance, so I had to make sure it didn’t cover up bits on the slide. This is something I can plan for, but didn’t take up too much time.

  • The last step was cutting up the footage into smaller chunks, and then transitioning between full screen and picture-in-picture. I didn’t plan to do this, but it works really well! I’m very happy with the result.

• This was recorded with a slow intentional speaking voice so that folks can speed it up if they prefer. I would probably listen to it on 2x, but I imagine 1.5x speed is good. I wanted to emphasize clarity.

• From here my plan is to film the rest of the course in order, so the next thing I’ll do is the course intro. I think this will make the module on Building Trust (the one I produced already) jump out as a bit of an odd duck, but that’s alright. I would much rather the first video people see is high quality, and the trust module is the 4th (of 8).

I’m not promising any sort of release date for this because I can’t estimate it, but this best place to hear about progress is on this newsletter. If you’re interested you can always reach out to me on Substack or LinkedIn. My plan is “as soon as possible”.