About Dan Brown

I'm a video editor and motion designer in Parker, Colorado, working remotely. I've been doing this professionally for 11 years, and I studied Cinema Arts and Sciences at Columbia College Chicago.

I've been cutting IT certification courses for Ascend Education since 2021, dozens of courses and several hundred videos. Before and alongside that: the American Lung Association, including a piece on robotic surgery with Intuitive Surgical. Flanders, for their 75th anniversary film. Admit.me, cutting multicam admissions interviews for business schools. Moms Into Fitness, through the stretch where that brand went viral. Lisap Milano, Woodtone Specialties, VDB | Compass.

For the last six years I've also supervised post-production for a high-volume templated video operation. I came in as one of the first editors on the product and grew into running it. I own the template library and the brand-compliance standards across more than twenty brands. I've interviewed and trained five editors, and I wrote and filmed the training material they learn from.

Somewhere in there the question stopped being how do I make this video and became how do I make a thousand of them without doing it by hand a thousand times. So I built render pipelines that drive After Effects templates at scale. Orders come in, assets get gathered, templates render headlessly, and every output gets checked before it ships. It wasn't much of a leap. I was already building the templates.

I wrote the documentation so an operator can open the repo with an assistant, describe what's broken and get walked through the fix without me. I filmed the tutorials too. I didn't want a system only I could run.

I started when I was 11, making videos with my friends on Windows Movie Maker because we loved movies. After Effects came a year or two after that, and I learned it off YouTube tutorials back when there weren't many.

Most of what I do I taught myself. Motion design, audio, 3D, the software side. I model in Blender and Cinema 4D and sell furniture and product models commercially. I write plugins for After Effects and Blender when the tools don't do what I need. I do my own audio post, so mixing, sound design and cleanup don't need a separate person. Rotoscoping is the same. Most editors farm that one out. I also run PropertyEdits, a real estate video service, and Stomptones, where I build and sell audio plugins.

Away from work I shoot film photography, play guitar and bass, and write screenplays. I love hiking, and I still watch a lot of movies.

The work is on the work page, with the video playing right there.