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Fairooz G.
Creating Visual Narratives using Gen AI | Storia
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March 3, 2025
Who wouldnt want to show off to classmates with good pocket money. But it came at a cost. When I started freelancing, I thought I had it all figured out. I was wrong. Here are 11 mistakes I made - so you don’t have to (but you will give it a shot anyway, so good luck! ;)): 1/ Buying useless paid courses that just taught me how to navigate freelancer.com, Elance, and Microworkers. (Spoiler: That’s not freelancing, that’s bidding wars.) 2/ Writing content with no goal. I wrote for the sake of writing—no focus on traffic, no lead generation, no results. Clients weren’t happy, and neither was I. 3/ Chasing speed over quality. Quick turnarounds, zero research - work looked good but lacked depth. And trust me, clients notice. 4/ Copying instead of “stealing” like an artist. I followed trends blindly instead of learning from great work and making it my own. 5/ Undervaluing myself. I charged pennies, thinking it was the only way to get clients. (Want to set real rates? Calculate your ideal income → divide by billable hours. Simple.) 6/ Saying yes to everything. Every project, every niche, every random request. I spread myself thin and became a jack of all trades, master of none. 7/ Thinking I had to impress every client. Turns out, I had to choose my clients too. Because bad clients drain energy, waste time, and rarely pay well. 8/ Over-delivering for free. More work, no extra pay. Clients loved me—until I burned out and quit. 9/ Building skyscrapers when clients just wanted a one-story house. Overcomplicating projects didn’t make me look smart - it just made clients confused. 10/ Fearing negotiations. I assumed people would walk away if I pushed back. The truth? Clients respect confidence. 11/ Relying on ONE platform for clients. I stayed in the wrong place for too long, waiting for magic to happen. It didn’t. And honestly? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Freelancing is a game of learning fast and adapting faster. Which of these mistakes have you made? Or better yet - which ones have you avoided? Lets discuss in chat!
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March 3, 2025
Faiz, I am in deep trouble! It started like this, on an evening a client of mine contacted me with urgency saying “I am in trouble. We have an event in 48 hours and I need a pitch deck and a product video for our fintech product!, with so many potential investors coming in and zero clue what to do, I cannot afford to blow this opportunity!” I was all like "wow, that's too much info in 2 mins." But, don't worry, we will break it down one by one and get started with the #pitch deck. I quickly sent him across a detailed 10-minute questionnaire that helps me understand - their product in depth, - potential markets, - revenue models - short term needs - long term goals - team and major of them all, - the industry problem it solves! Once we had the questionnaire filled, things came clearer to me as to what approach we should take to build the deck. Clearly, the one with intensive research was not feasible keeping the time constraint in mind. So we gathered as many research papers and articles as possible to learn more about the product, its impact, and industry challenges from scholarly articles and ResearchGate! Then I broke it down into bits and pieces, understanding the product USPs and the most powerful solution it offers to the challenge. Soon enough the picture started coming clearer to me as to what information has to go in which slide. Once that was ready, I immediately jumped into the mood board side of things. Luckily, the brand had a good brand guideline which made our work at least 5 times easier. With the guideline, we created a mood board for every slide that needed to come alive. In a dark theme, we built a presentation that (not to brag) amused the client! But we were still not done with 1 day left for a stunning #video for the product. Our script writer wrote a script that had - a very powerful hook for the video, - a rehook that grabbed everyone's attention, - a problem followed by agitation and - a solution ending things with a strong note in a cliffhanger! Once the script was ready, we made the visual board for the video with rough pen and paper #sketch and immediately got into After Effects with a few templates we quickly grabbed from Envato! With some basic 3D mockups we had ready made in Blender, we were able to make a video that not only "told" the #product story, but also sold the product in story! The event went by and we had some amazing messages from the client’s side. Here are a few of those screenshots the client got from their stakeholders. This has been by far one of our best #achievements and #successstories. What's your proudest career moment? P.S: If you wish to see the pitch deck, simply drop a “Send” in the comments and I will DM it to you!
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March 18, 2025