Meet Dustin Demoret

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dustin Demoret a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dustin, thrilled to have you on the platform as I think our readers can really benefit from your insights and experiences. In particular, we’d love to hear about how you think about burnout, avoiding or overcoming burnout, etc.

Even though I feel like it’s impossible to fully avoid burnout, my strategy for addressing it has been the one that’s the most obvious; try to maintain a healthy work-life-balance. Setting clear and achievable boundaries with my job has allowed me to leave work at work and enjoy my free time by doing things that help recharge me. Playing music helps creatively recharge me. Spending time with my fiancé helps relax my mind and reset. I’ve put into context that my job as a video editor isn’t something that is an urgent need outside of work hours, so if I get request that would push me too far into the evening, I know that it can wait until tomorrow and everyone will be fine. Obviously there are deadlines to meet and clients to keep happy, so know how to choose your battles, but having set boundaries makes it a lot easier to choose.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m the Director of Post Production and Lead Video Editor for Chop Shop Post. We’re a commercial post production house that handles anything post related from concept to delivery. I was always drawn to some sort of artistic career and originally wondered if I could make a career in music. After taking some video production classes in high school, I shifted my focus to video because it felt tangental to music (thinking I could make music videos), but was a more viable career path. I graduated with my Bachelors in Digital Video Production in 2014 and immediately jumped in and found myself in the advertising world.

I started working at a full service production company, Bayonet Media, in 2015 and we made everything from 15 second Instagram ads to a feature length documentary (Pressing On: The Letterpress Film). After having some conversations with folks around town, it became clear that people didn’t see us excelling in post production. I then lead the effort to spin off our post side of things into Chop Shop Post, a sister company under the Bayonet umbrella. This has allowed us to equally highlight our production and post production efforts and have opened a lot of opportunities for us to work with new and exciting clients! We just wrapped up an exciting series of videos for Salesforce and are already revving up our 2025 work. This year will be my 10th year with Bayonet/Chop Shop Post and I’m very excited and grateful to have worked with such a supportive and talented team for this long.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

One of the best pieces of advice I got when I was starting out was “know your niche”. I was eager and was telling everyone that I could do whatever they wanted; I could edit, I could help on set, I could help set up audio, etc. But if you don’t let people know what you actually want to do and what you’re actually good at, no one will think of you when that role opens. If I wanted to edit, but told someone I could help run a camera, they won’t think of me next time they need an editor.

Another thing that greatly opened up my career was learning how to do Motion Design in After Effects. I took a motion design class in college only because I thought it might be nice to familiarize myself with other aspects of the post production pipeline. That turned out to be very advantages. My first full-time job out of college was doing only motion design for nine months. And then landing my job at Bayonet (now Chop Shop) was really because I could bring both editing and motion design to the table to help enhance our videos.

The third aspect I’ll mention is just be a kind person who people want to work with. I’ve seen a lot of people who are far more talented than me lose out on jobs and opportunities because they weren’t good working partners. The people in charge of hiring pick up on these things and they can sway decisions immensely.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

My parents have always been very supportive of me expressing myself and finding my own voice as a person. They didn’t try to replicate themselves in me, but rather gave me the support and space to become my own person. My dad was a farm boy, football player who became an electrician; I was scene kid in a pop punk band who became a video editor.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dustindemoret.com
• Instagram: @dustindemoret

Image Credits

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