Hi there,

When I worked at the TODAY show, the editors were some of the highest paid people on staff. Why?

Because they were real-life magicians and we all knew without them, our stories wouldn’t exist.

Sometimes you’d come back to 30 Rock a bit sheepish saying, “I TRIED but this is all I could get.” This being from an interview that didn’t go as planned or video footage you messed up (because often it was just me doing all the things in the field and the deadlines were real.)

Because you KNEW you were giving them a Herculean task of “PLEASE just make it amazing…”

It had to be a story that would get approved by your executive producer and ideally get the coveted and rarely uttered, “GREAT work” that kept the puppy dog/owner slightly toxic validation cycle looping endlessly. (isn’t that most of corporate life though?!)
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The best editors (Molly, Bob (in the tux below), Mark) us producers would often Hunger Games each other and make side pleas to them if one of our colleagues had already snatched them. Or beg Sam (to the right of me in the first row below), my amazingly talented co-worker (who always seemed to get first dibs on the BEST editors) to PLEASE let me use *****insert one of them this ONE time.

Bargaining for even an hour of their magician storytelling brain on YOUR story was huge and without them you might not get that “GOOD JOB, PATRICE” from your boss. #tragedy

👉 The best editors had that natural feel for a story.
👉 They understood beats.
👉 They knew when to hold a shot and when to cut.
👉 When to zoom in and when to pause the music.
👉 When to let a line breathe or when to tell you, “you need to rewrite this story because it’s NOT IT.”
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The best editors could be ruthless in their feedback to you as a producer, but that’s because they, too, wanted this to be the best story possible.
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These skills have always been rare and CapCut and Descript didn’t change that.
But they’ve certainly made cutting video easier.
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However the gap between cutting video and telling a story with video are two entirely different animals. A gap AI has never been able to close.
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Until now.. Maybe?

Yesterday, Vee and I ran a live training for our My StoryPro members on exactly this question: can AI actually edit a story that you’d be proud to post?

Not do a quick in-and-out cut. But can AI really EDIT a story?

For the past week I’ve been deep in that AI Video making troll cave.

Fun for a bit, then you realize you might need an intervention. Or at the very least water, food, a pee break.

I was channeling my inner LinkedIn hustle hard with protein coffee (duh) and a cross fit training workout all before 7AM bro energy. ***shudders

But it was necessary.

I used Claude and ChatGPT, combined each with the power of My StoryPro and experimented with different types of workflows for videos and saw for myself what “isn’t quite there yet” and what is a “Holy hot damn, this is a total business unlock.”

For my business, storytelling videos like THIS and THIS draw in new followers, customers and trial users to My StoryPro.
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But there’s a problem… those videos take time or money and usually both.
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So much time that for a while last year I paid a professional editor to make them but the dirty secret is is that you STILL have to prep the editor and then there is the back-and-forth revisions, the trying to explain yourself, time zones…and all of a sudden it’s been a week and you’re out hundreds of dollars.
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Our best and quickest editor still cost us on the low end $300 per video and on the high end, $700.
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So I really wanted to see if AI could close that gap.

Think about how much footage is just gathering dust in your camera roll right now?

But yet, THAT footage on your phone is the only IP you actually own and is uncopyable, even by AI.

Because it’s your life. That footage is packed full of stories.
I sat on years of clips myself before I realized I was leaving money and connection on the table.

Stories that you can weave into your business, your offerings or your pitches.

And for most of us it just sits there.

Thousands of clips rotting in a Google Drive or your cloud because turning them into videos is a pain in the ass.#facts.
Or we don’t know how to connect personal to professional.

The first few attempts I did with the AI video editing were garbage… but then, I figured out the unlock…

The moment I started treating it like I used to treat my editors at 30 Rock — specific notes, labeled files, shot-by-shot direction, storytelling beat suggestions, emotional levers to use – everything changed.
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For $16 in tokens and a lot of revisions, I got a video that would have cost me easily $1000 with a human editor given all the back-and-forth. And it sounds like me thanks to always starting in My StoryPro to help me see the threads in my life.

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And then Vee showed people how to create stories “The lazy way” and no joke….the output we were getting is not just postable, it’s pretty damn good! (and I will be posting to my feed BUT I’M STILL TWEAKING.)

Here’s what I actually learned after days in that troll cave:

• The workflow starts in MyStoryPro. Not ChatGPT, not Claude. The script and story structure have to exist before you touch a single clip.
• The unlock was treating AI exactly like my 30 Rock editors – specific direction, shot-by-shot notes, the storytelling beats we used in TV.
• The lazy version works too. Vee’s videos won’t win a Webby, but they’re good enough to post in a week you’ve got no bandwidth.
• The skill that made all of it work isn’t new. It’s the same producer brain I’ve had for 20 years. I just forgot it at first and I let Claude lead when it needed to be the other way around.

We’re still figuring this out and I know I’m barely scratching the surface.
But your footage is sitting there either way and you should be extracting stories to use for your business.

Would love to hear where you’re at with this… have you tried making videos with AI? Any wins, any disasters?

The full training replay (Vee’s lazy flow and my hands-on one) lives inside My StoryPro, and next month we’re running a bigger workshop where we build these AI + storytelling workflows alongside you to help you sound more like YOU in your business.

Try My StoryPro free for 7 days!

More on that soon.

And I’ll link a few of the videos I made with AI in next week’s newsletter.

Have a great weekend,

XO
Patrice