I am Sebastián Henríquez Rivas, a graduated filmmaker and current freelance video editor.
👴 27
🗣 Spanish, English and some Portuguese
📍 Bogotá, Colombia
🔗 chevyhrs.com (made with Notion)
I have a B.A. in Audiovisual and Multimedia Communications from Universidad de La Sabana.
Most of my experience so far has been in film production, editing and screenwriting; in independent projects, with production companies, and recently with a YouTube content creator.
Almost all of my education and experience has been focused on filmmaking and I dream of one day being able to produce movies.
Yet, I have always projected many of my duties and passions into visual design and, even before I started my degree, I have been making websites so I can connect with people through the things that I like. This is when my interest in online products started: I asked myself how I could provide online spaces for people to find information, start conversations, and create communities. This led me to design many visual iterations of my own personal site using Wordpress.org as a starting point, looking for free hosting and getting involved in communities moved by the same ideas as mine. All of these projects are now offline.
Back in university, I was able to use my passion for design to provide a visual bonus to the projects I did back then, always doing my best to present documents and references that would show more than just information. I was able to take a web design class as well as design some app ideas that were used in my classes. Sadly, most of this work was rather buried in the technicalities of filmmaking amongst the rush of working towards a degree that needed my attention.
When I finished my Bachelor's by the end of 2016 and started working on my graduation thesis—in which I was the lead producer—I realized that while those four years of studies had provided me with exceptional resources to produce audiovisual pieces, there was still something lacking: the process of managing a production team and sharing mutually important documents was impractical, difficult, disorganized, and ultimately always depending on platforms that were neither made for us nor for traditional documents and organization tools. We used Facebook groups to communicate and share documents, WhatsApp for more specific chats, and Google Drive (as well as offline software) to store documents.
This led me to wonder how I could solve this issue for me and my peers, and as I started getting into more serious work I realized that this wasn't just an issue for students but the industry in general. The available tools made my job seem super tedious at the time, and so I decided to start light and see how well I could be designing something more serious: the concept of an app that could track tv shows and movies, serving as a hub for streaming and as a community space to exchange ideas (I wrote a Medium post about it and published some screens on Dribbble).
That's how I landed on "Binger", which was my first proper approach to a UX and UI project with the help of Kevin Clark, a Product Design Manager at Shopify Montreal, who was kind enough to serve as my guide and feedback provider. He helped me understand how crucial visual design is for online products, not only aesthetically, but also as a mean of providing users with a satisfying and useful experience.
After this very positive introduction, I started working on some redesigns for sites like Goodreads that never saw the light of day and haven't been completed. But I always went back to my desire to work on something that could solve the issue that I had been dealing with firsthand for a long time. Some days I would find myself working on this project and giving up since it required me to have technical knowledge that I haven't quite mastered yet and which I don't really feel so keen on learning: coding. Starting my own platform looked more and more like an utterly difficult task that I was unable to fit into my life at the time: after all, I was just a recently graduated young professional who was looking for a place to start and make some money to kick things off.
That's how I landed in the job I've been doing for the past year and a half: video editing for a content creator on YouTube and his side projects. I've been working remotely all this time - something that had previously seemed like an impossible task for a video editor, taking into account the amounts of video data that would need to be sent back and forth and the multiple versions and creative decisions that had to be made without being able to collaborate in real-time as you'd do in a production office. Add that to the fact that team members live in different countries and spend much of their time traveling around the world, the process just takes really long.
Many of the nonconformities from this job come down to the same issue: documents and data on multiple platforms, neither containing standard formats nor a management platform. Sharing documents and separating tasks and professional duties was just not as organized and straightforward as it should be. All of that work has given me the opportunity to develop experience in so many fields, but ultimately it gave me the final push to use my free hours almost every day, as well as many of my weekends, to work on the project that I am presenting to you now.
While still dedicating myself to creating my dream product, I started using Notion more and more for my personal projects while simultaneously discovering the website, which is when I knew that my ideas might not have to depend on a completely new platform - instead, they could live inside an already existing one that has many of the same objectives as I do as a filmmaker looking for a space to be more organized and productive.