Hello. I’m Anand. It’s pronounced ahn-undh if you want to be truly authentic, but you can slide by with ‘on-in’ if you’re feeling lazy. Last name’s Mahalingam, which is not that hard to pronounce when you actually just read the name. Muh-haul-ing-um. I’m a video editor with a background in editing videos for social media and branded content marketing.
I got my start in video editing around 2012-2013, when I was a part of a student-run organization at the University of Pittsburgh. We were putting on a dance competition and needed to get people in the seats. I downloaded Adobe Premiere and After Effects to create marketing videos for the competition, including trailers, teasers, and comedy sketches.
I ended up dropping out of The University of Pittsburgh because they did not have a film program, and I found a program in Orlando, Florida called the FIRST School (Florida Institute of Recording, Sound and Technology). While there, I learned everything about the filmmaking process, from writing all the way through post-production. Even though my education was teaching me so much about the process, I still gravitated towards editing and I kept making videos for organizations back home in Pittsburgh.
I moved back to Pittsburgh after school and started my own videography/video editing business. I shot and edited marketing videos for small businesses, student organizations, and even a corporate video for UPMC, the major hospital in the area.
In 2015 I moved to Los Angeles and started working at a company called DanceOn, where I really feel like I cut my teeth in the digital media space. One of my first tasks while working there was to take 30 clips from our stable of creators and export the most compelling 15-30 seconds for all of the platforms we used. This included Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Musical.ly, YouTube, and Twitter. Each platform has its set of best practices when it comes to videos so I had to create presets in Adobe Media Encoder and organize my file management system in such a way that I could find each export easily. I had to do this task every morning at 10am and every afternoon at 1pm. 30 clips, 6 platforms, twice a day – that’s 360 videos exported every day!
Since my two years starting at DanceOn, I have had the pleasure of working in the digital media space for 6 additional years working at companies like ATTN:, CLI Studios, and Airrack; as well as clients like Beats by Dre, Amazon, Citgo, and much more. I enjoy working within a team and my positive attitude and sense of humor can bring everyone’s spirits up when we’re going through the dog days of a long, tough project.
Anand Mahalingam 