- Prod.
- OWEZ.IN
- Scene
- ABOUT
- Take
- 07
- Loc.
- MUMBAI
The person behind the cut.
Hi — I’m Owez Shaikh. Editor first, developer second, Mumbai always. Six years ago I moved a clip half a second earlier and felt a stranger’s attention shift. I’ve been chasing that half-second ever since — through timelines, through code, and now with a small team spread across four continents.
Roll sound. Roll camera. Scroll.
Scene 02 · The rules
Five rules, no exceptions.
Nobody hands you a style guide for freelancing. You write your own after enough projects go sideways. These are mine.
- R.01
Ship the cut, not the excuse.
Deadlines don’t move because the render crashed twice. I plan for the crash.
- R.02
Boring at second three is wrong at minute three.
Retention isn’t a vanity metric to me — it’s the only review that can’t be flattered out of.
- R.03
Feedback is data, not a verdict.
“I don’t like it” isn’t useful. “It felt slow after the intro” is. I ask until I get the second one.
- R.04
Say no early, not never.
A fast no protects the work more than a slow maybe. I’d rather lose the job than ghost the timeline.
- R.05
The tool changes. The eye doesn’t.
Premiere, React, Claude — different timelines, same question: what’s the boring part, and can it go.
Scene 03 · The story
Seven chapters, no montage.
Nobody starts with a studio. This one started with an overheating laptop, a lockdown, and a friend’s terrible gaming clip. Year by year, honestly told.
- 2019 CH.01
A laptop that could barely render
It starts in a small room in Mumbai with a hand-me-down laptop that overheated if you looked at it wrong. I wasn’t trying to become an editor. I just wanted to make a video for a friend look less bad. Exports took hours. I’d start one before dinner and pray it finished before the power flickered. But something about dragging a clip half a second earlier and feeling the whole thing suddenly work — that hooked me in a way school never did.
- 2020 CH.02
The year the world stayed home
Lockdown flattened everything, and weirdly, that saved me. Everyone was suddenly online, local creators needed edits yesterday, and I had nothing but time. I cut daily. Badly at first, then less badly. I learned Premiere from YouTube tutorials at 2x speed and un-learned half of it by actually shipping. That year I found out I could sit for ten hours straight if the work was interesting, and about four minutes if it wasn’t.
- 2021 CH.03
Falling in love with the retention graph
Somewhere in here the obsession changed shape. It stopped being “make it look cool” and became “why did they leave at second three?” Retention graphs became a scoreboard I checked like other people check cricket scores. I’d re-cut the same intro five ways just to see which one held. Nobody asked me to do this. That’s how I knew it wasn’t a phase.
- 2022 CH.04
The accidental second craft
Clients kept asking the same follow-up: “can you also fix our website?” I said yes before I knew how, then stayed up learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so the yes wouldn’t be a lie. Turns out the two crafts rhyme. A slow page loses people exactly like a slow edit does. Code just became another timeline — one where the frames are milliseconds.
- 2023 CH.05
More work than hands
The inbox outgrew me. I had two options: say no a lot, or trust other people with the thing I’d built alone in a bedroom. I chose trust, slowly. An editor first. Then a designer. Then a scriptwriter. Handing off work you used to do yourself is a strange grief — and then one day someone on the team cuts something better than you would have, and it stops being grief entirely.
- 2024 CH.06
Four continents, one desk
The map filled in. A creator in the US, a founder in Europe, an agency in Australia — all routed through one desk in Mumbai. I learned to live in three time zones at once and discovered that “good morning” is a fully time-independent greeting. The work got bigger, but the ritual stayed identical: open the timeline, find the boring part, kill it.
- Now CH.07
Still the same room, basically
The laptop is better. The desk is no longer cracked. There’s a team where there used to be just me and a render bar. But the honest truth is the job hasn’t changed since 2019: something is dull, and I get to make it not dull. I still get the same small electric feeling when a cut lands. The day that feeling stops, I’ll go do something else. It hasn’t stopped.
Scene 04 · The tracks
Every tool, on the timeline.
Software skills, plotted the only way an editor knows how: as clips. Each bar starts the year the tool entered real, paid work — and none of them have ended yet.
Video
Premiere Pro 
After Effects 
Photoshop 
Blender Code
HTML & CSS 
JavaScript 
React 
Python AI
ChatGPT 
Claude 
Cursor Every track was recorded the same way: a real project I’d already said yes to, and a deadline that didn’t care that I hadn’t learned the tool.
Scene 05 · Behind the scenes
The bits that missed the cut.
Not everything fits in the highlight reel. A few frames from the blooper folder.
- 00:04:12 Actual first export A 9:16 wedding highlight reel. Took 6 hours to render on a laptop that also ran the family Wi-Fi.
- 00:19:47 Desk setup One monitor, one extra monitor propped on a stack of old textbooks. Still true today, better textbooks.
- 00:33:02 Most-used shortcut Ctrl+K for a razor cut. My right hand has done it more times than I can count.
- 00:41:15 Fuel Chai, not coffee. Non-negotiable, mildly judgmental of coffee people.
- 00:58:30 Actual guilty pleasure Rewatching old edits I’m embarrassed by. Cheapest way to see how far the eye has come.
- 01:12:00 Off the timeline Cricket, badly cooked biryani experiments, and arguing about vada pav toppings.
Scene 07 · Bad habits
Nobody’s perfect cut.
In the interest of not sounding like a LinkedIn post, the honest list.
- B.01
Hoarding fonts I’ll never use
Folder has 400+. I’ve shipped work with maybe twelve.
- B.02
“final_v2_FINAL_reallyfinal”
My file naming is a crime scene. I know. I’m working on it. (I’m not.)
- B.03
40 tabs to research one plugin
Somehow all 40 stay open through three unrelated projects.
- B.04
“Five more minutes,” meaning two hours
Said at 1am. Every time. The clock has never once believed me.
Scene 08 · Small joys
The good frames.
- The frame audio syncs
- That first clean lock between waveform and cut — still gets me, six years in.
- “Wait, how’d you do that?”
- The best kind of client message. No context needed.
- Finding the exact right SFX
- Out of eleven thousand library sounds, one is always perfect. Worth the hunt.
- Export bar hits 100% early
- A render that finishes before the deadline is basically a holiday.
- A ten-second shortcut
- Times a thousand cuts a year. That’s the whole game, really.
Scene 09 · Desk objects
Five things on the desk.
- OBJ.01
The mug
Says coffee, holds chai. Nobody’s corrected the mug yet.
- OBJ.02
The sticky-note wall
Half deadlines, half half-finished shortcut ideas.
- OBJ.03
The drive labeled “DO NOT FORMAT”
In caps. Learned that lesson exactly once, the hard way.
- OBJ.04
The cracked phone stand
Holds the reference footage. Structurally a miracle at this point.
- OBJ.05
The plant
Somehow still alive. Nobody, including me, knows how.
Scene 10 · Words I overuse
My verbal tics.
My team could build a bingo card. I’d probably lose.
- basically
- literally
- quick pass
- let’s just
- ship it
- render it
- honestly
- no worries
- one sec
- circle back
Scene 11 · Lessons learned the hard way
Nobody warns you.
-
Never trust a render at 99%.
Watched one hang there for forty minutes once, an hour before a client call. Now I export early and sit on it.
-
Keep the raw footage until they say “final,” not “looks good.”
“Looks good” has been walked back more times than I can count. “Final” hasn’t, yet.
-
Invoice #14 is where I learned to charge properly.
Did the math on hours-versus-rate for the first time in year two. Wasn’t a fun afternoon. Was a necessary one.
Scene 12 · Contact me on
Pick a channel.
Scene 13 · End credits
- Written by
- Owez Shaikh
- Raised by
- Mumbai
- Educated by
- The internet, mostly at 2x speed
- Powered by
- Chai and the 10pm focus window
- Backed by
- A small team who make me look good
- Shot on location
- One desk · four continents
You made it to the credits.
That’s further than most people get with anything on the internet, and I don’t take it lightly. If something here resonated — a chapter, a belief, a vada pav opinion — I’d honestly love to hear it. No form, no funnel. Just an inbox.