Editing Portfolio

I was one of South Africa's original YouTubers, back when being a YouTuber wasn't a thing there yet. I built my channel to 7K subscribers at a time when YouTube was barely accessible in the country, which meant every single one of those subs was earned the hard way. Before I ever edited for anyone else, I edited for myself.

YouTube editor at heart

I'm the editor behind Em on the Brain, the YouTube channel of Emily McDonald, a neuroscientist and mindset coach with over 1.5 million followers whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Business Insider, and The Jennifer Hudson Show. She films straight to camera, then I take it from there: I cut every video, shape the story in the timeline, and package it with titles, thumbnails, and SEO built to get clicked. After a channel strategy pivot I led through the edit, we grew her YouTube from 40K to 100K subscribers in three months, with nearly 5 million views on Instagram along the way. Raw straight-to-camera footage in, bingeable videos out.

Emonthebrain

My Mom Died

I edit every episode of My Mom Died, a show about grief, loss, and life after losing a loved one, which I also co-developed with its host, Gabri. In the timeline, it's the most delicate work I do: knowing when to let a silence breathe, when to cut away, and how to keep an episode honest without letting it get heavy. The short-form is where the show actually grew. I cut every clip and social-first video around it, holiday diaries, journal entries, and poem-based pieces made specifically for the feed, and that clip strategy took the show to 16K TikTok followers with 2.5 million video views and 1.5 million views on Instagram, all within its first six months.

My Mom Died

My editing career has taken the long way here, on purpose. After my own channel in South Africa, I moved to LA and studied film at the New York Film Academy, then cut my teeth in agency rooms at Richy Films, where I edited for Usher and cut promos for Alessia Cara. Around the same time I directed and edited a music video that landed Top 10 on a Billboard national airplay chart. From there I went high-volume, editing 3 to 6 videos a week at Indigenous Media with clips pulling 50K to 120K views per platform, then ran broadcast and content strategy for a nonprofit organization, producing 2 to 3 videos a week and managing live streams for audiences of 600 to 1,000 concurrent viewers. I later ran production at a podcast studio called You and Me Media, working across shows like Girls Gone Bible and Female Founder World. On the brand side, my edits have run in campaigns for Samsung, Meta Ray-Bans, H&M, and Liquid I.V. Every one of those rooms sharpened something: speed, polish, story instinct, pressure. The creator world is where I finally get to use all of it at once.

OtheR