Finding your true passion, and being a full-time creative.

In high school, I was into drafting, graphic design, photography, and just being creative. I loved it. I was really interested in architecture and started in the faculty in my third year of university. It was fun for a bit, but later on I figured it just wasn’t for me. It was more stressful than I thought it would be. I told myself that I needed to pick a hobby. I needed to express myself. I was already doing a bit of photography, but I wanted more practice. I asked my friends and family if I could take photos of them and I ended up taking photos for some birthday parties. That’s when I got introduced to videography because of my friend Kevin. At first, I was just kind of in the background, I had no idea what I was doing. But I just kept learning. I read books and watched Youtube videos on photography and cinematography. I learned how compositions, lighting, and movement helped tell a different story from beginning, middle, to end. From there, I wanted to do weddings and start my own business. I spoke to people who have been in the industry for a long time and asked if I could help them out and tag along. I wanted to see how the whole process worked because I wanted to get started on doing it by myself. I got referred to a client and my very first event was a wedding with 400-500 people. It was definitely a learning curve for me. I loved doing photography, but I really wanted to get myself into videography. There was always something to learn along the way.

I was almost finished school and I told myself that I wanted to pursue this. I’m open-minded towards everything. When someone shows me a different kind of edit, I like to absorb that, use it, and keep updating my own kind of style. My form of style is a narrative, putting a timeline together that tells a story. I finished going to school as an architect, I tried to find a job for a year and realized there weren’t a lot of opportunities out there. When there are, they’re long, stressful hours. That’s when I asked myself, ‘What am I doing wrong? Do I need to pursue this or just switch careers already?’ This was in late 2015, and I realized that this was not what I wanted it to be. I do believe everything happens for a reason. It’s a good thing I found videography. I would get a few referrals for events here and there, but I wasn’t where I wanted to be. Fast forward to 2019, my parents told me to find a job, so I did. I started working in sales. It was different. It was tough to adjust to at first. I was already dealing with depression and anxiety and when the pandemic happened, everything was put on hold. I started working from home and it was just super hard because we couldn’t do anything. When the pandemic was announced, I asked for two weeks off. I went hiking almost every day and it was just a breath of fresh air for me. It was a refresh. But then I got back, and it was just stressful. I was so drained and didn’t have any energy to do other things that I loved. I took another vacation and it got cut short due to training at work. That’s when I decided it was the end for me. I prolonged this transition way longer than I wanted to. That’s when I decided to pursue videography and photography full-time. I chose my passion. When I quit, I stopped feeling anxious, I felt free. I felt like it was God’s way of telling me that I needed to quit that job in order for all of this to sink in. I’m not even at my prime yet and I still have a lot to go through. Being full-time opened up a lot of opportunities for me.

I have a really good team. We all work so well together. When you establish a connection with people, there’s just this unspoken language that you have with each other, we know what we want from one another. Find a good team, work with them, learn with them and keep building each other up right from the ground up. I did a mentorship program for kids in grade 9 a couple months ago, I told them if this was something they wanted to do; they have to be willing to do everything. Don’t skip a few things because you want it done a certain way. When you want to transition into being full time, start where you’re at financially. Figure out how much bills you have to pay each month and ask yourself if you quit your job right now will you be able to pay them for the next few months? If not, try to find opportunites to make it happen. Pick something you’re passionate about and build from there. Don’t force yourself to do something because you think you have to do it or because you went to school for it. You will be burnt out in the end. Pick a hobby, and if you’re passionate about it, keep going, it’ll all work itself out in the end. Even if nothing happens, you won’t regret it because you found something that you love. It doesn’t ever feel like work to me because I love what I’m doing. I feel like everyone needs to experience that somehow.