Hello Steemit! Former Youtube/History Channel Writer and Video Editor Here!

Heya steemit! Good old Jerry B brought me here and I am super excited to figure out how this site works and join this community!

The tl:dr of this is: I make educational videos, write sci fi and horror, love to cook, take lot's of pictures of bees, read tarot cards, and am deeply involved with http://www.theclimatemobilization.org/ 's movement to get America on track to prevent a climate catastrophe. Follow me if you wanna see more of any of that! I also sailed across the Pacific Ocean once, through a hurricane and I've got some photos of the not-hurricane part of my voyage!

I went to Ithaca College to become a filmmaker and then proceeded to completely fall in love with Ithaca the city. I hope to someday live there again.

For my thesis I wanted to experiment with telling a story across multiple platforms, so I made a short film, webcomic and website that all took place in the same story world. I had met an awesome professional named Caitlin Burns during my college career, and her plus one of my favorite professors, Elisabeth Nonas, instilled in me a desire to do something crazy. So I did.

They're all still up on: http://www.pandeminc.com/pandemonium/ because I am a nostalgic old fool who still pays to host the website each year even though nobody goes to it.

It was the story of Samael Morningstar, and the general vibe was "Dilbert" meets "Paradise Lost." The webcomic was set thousands and thousands of years after the events of the short film after the main character Samael has left heaven and started his own "Freedom Bureau" called Pan-Dem Inc.

From there I went on to graduate and get a job at an amazing company called BoomGen Studios (in large part due to my transmedia thesis and even more importantly a recommendation from Caitlin Burns). They are a transmedia storytelling company that also specializes in marketing Middle Eastern Stories to mainstream American audiences. A function that has consistently gotten harder and ever more important in the years since I left.

The big project I worked on while I was there was to run logistics for the Oscar campaign for the documentary "The Square" a life changing documentary about the revolution in Egypt and the people who protested in Tahrir Square. The trailer is below and you can watch it on Netflix. I highly recommend you do, but it is very graphic at times so be forewarned.

So spoiler alert, we didn't win the Oscar. A bs documentary about musicians won, deff not bitter and cynical about that one... Anyway once we didn't have the campaign money coming in BoomGen no longer could afford to pay me so I ended up having to leave, which worked out because my next job was at Google!

I had found an anonymous video editing job on mandy.com or something and applied to it. The people got back to me and told me that they couldn't tell me who they were, but that they were big and to meet them at this address.

I was pretty sure I was going to get mugged, but I also really needed a job so I did. Imagine my surprise when the elevator doors open and I'm staring at the front desk of Youtube.

I found out that I was interviewing to be an employee of the Youtube Lab Channels (owned by Google). I met Jake Roper, the host of Vsauce3 and had a great interview. I was called back for another interview, spent some more time shooting the shit with Jake, and then didn't get the job.

An important lesson in perseverance though, I kept in touch with Jake over the next year, and when the guy who got the job over me didn't work out Jake reached out to me, and of course I took it.

I loved the time I spent working for Youtube, free lunches every day (sushi on tuesdays and thursdays) nap pods that you could go use without anyone batting an eye, and everyone who worked there was intelligent, kind and creative.

I brought my A game to the job and over the course of a year became responsible for researching, writing, and editing almost every mindblow, Lut, Game Lut, D.O.N.G., BiDiPi you saw during 2015.

They allowed me to create my own show on Wesauce, the community channel, in which I would work with Jake to talk about his filmmaking and research process for the big set piece Vsauce videos. It was called ITVS (Inside The Vsauce Studio) and I'll be posting another old episode of that show later this week.

Somewhere in the middle of all this an old highschool friend asked me if I wanted to sail across the Pacific Ocean with him and collect plastic samples for The Ocean Cleanup. Ive got a lot of great stories from that journey to blog about, and uncomfortable number of them involve human feces(not mine)...stories for another time shudder I was 16 days at sea, and the first few were through a hurricane. Probably the most afraid I've ever been in my entire life.

Towards the end of my time at Vsauce they were looking to launch a new channel where they could put all of the shows that I wrote and edited. We called it D.O.N.G or Do Online Now, Guys/Gals. I managed the channel, decided what episodes to pursue and delegated additional work to my co-workers, Lulu (awesome animator) and Guy (awesome guy who basically had the same job as me but only for Vsauce1).

Then tragedy (for me) struck, Youtube was deciding to dissolve the lab channels and give full ownership to the original creators. Vsauce no longer had a set budget allocated to them by Youtube and Jake and Michael moved out to L.A. to take Vsauce in a new direction. I wasn't going to move out to LA, and their budget was unknown so we had to part ways, but on good terms. I still watch Vsauce videos like crazy, and secretly pray for the day when they get so big that they can hire some NYC folks to do good work.

From there I did some freelance for Frederator another awesome Youtube channel responsible for "Bravest Warriors" and "Bee and Puppy Cat"some of the best animation happening on Youtube in my opinion.

Then I landed a history channel job which paid well and damn near broke me. I had moved to Hoboken because that was a really easy commute (20-30 min) to Youtube, but History was a solid 1-2 hours of busses, subways, and walking. On top of that I was working mostly on Ancient Aliens, a show that I not only hate, but I also felt was making the world a worse place.

I had gone from making educational content that inspired millions of people to ask interesting questions about the world they live in, to spreading thinly veiled arian race allegories about how only some humans have alien dna and are therefore superior. Also they forced me to edit things that I just knew were historically not true. Mercury is not a fuel for ancient spaceships you motherfuckers. Chin Shi Wong Di had mercury in his tomb because 1) he drank it thinking it would make him immortal 2) he had a mini river built that would flow with mercury near is grave and 3) because it looks cool. Mystery solved dickheads.

Anyyywaaaayyyy

I got lucky, my amazing producers gave me the chance to develop my own show. I called it History Lists, it was super educational and also super successful. Racking up over 8 Million views on FB.

https://www.facebook.com/HISTORY/videos/vb.8429246183/10153771301686184/?type=2&theater

I didn't know it at the time, but my video succeeding had put a huge target on my back. My bosses bosses boss wanted to fire most of the people in my department, but all of a sudden that became really hard to do because our department had just produced the most viewed, liked, commented, and shared video History had ever uploaded online, and for the insanely low budget of $3,000 dollars.

So the higher ups said that they hated the writer, narrator, and editor and that he had to be replaced. For the record I hate my voice too, but 10M views don't lie, they wanted to get rid of me so they could put their own toadies in the positions where my current (and awesome) bosses were in.

Long story short, they fired everyone down the chain of command until they got to me, they paid me out for my unaired episodes and then that was it. They also never gave me any credit for my work. So that wasn't cool.

Now I've gone full freelance in both the writing space and video creation space, and while I can't upload a lot of the projects I'm working on currently, stay tuned for some sci-fi and horror videos that I'm very excited for.

I also spend a lot of time organizing the Hoboken Chapter of The Climate Mobilization, a group that after looking at the data realized that the only way people my age (26) are going to survive past 2050 is if the United States (and rest of the world too) enters into a mobilization effort on the same scale as the military mobilization we went through during ww2. We need to create a lot of jobs, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be green ones. We're making some great progress in Hoboken and I'd be happy to talk on that in the future.

Lastly for now, I'm a beekeeper. I love bees, I love honey, and I love turning honey into mead, which is an alcoholic honey wine. Happy to give people recipes.