When Jordan Orme ’19 created his YouTube channel at the beginning of the pandemic, he had no idea it would grow so quickly. Orme had spent the previous two years editing music videos for major artists such as Justin Bieber and Post Malone, working on documentaries for celebrities including Demi Lovato and Kylie Jenner, and creating commercials for Amazon and Nike. His channel started as a passion project, with Orme hoping to pass along insights he had gleaned from these experiences into video editing advice. When he began breaking down edits on some of his favorite music videos—especially in the K-pop genre— his following boomed. In the four years since launching, Orme’s channel has amassed more than 873,000 subscribers and his videos have garnered more than 111 million views. While the numbers are eye popping, he realized his work was not truly fulfilling.
“Last year, I was driving home and I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit convict me that I had been living a life of idolatry. I had been so success oriented. I had put money and popularity first, instead of God,” Orme said. “I started crying in my car and knew I needed to repent. I realized that the only thing I’m going to take with me from this life is my relationship with Jesus. It’s the only thing I’m going to have forever, and all of the personal success I had prioritized was just fluff that didn’t really matter. I was on a bad trajectory, so I decided to turn my life around and try to live more like Jesus.”
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Originally from Hawaii, Orme’s family moved to a small town in Wisconsin when he was in middle school. As a child, Orme developed two strong passions—soccer and art. Unfortunately, his high school in Wisconsin didn’t have a soccer team, so he decided to become a kicker for their football team. Orme was a talented kicker and received a few offers from colleges across the country to play football. Although he didn’t get an athletic scholarship, he felt called to Azusa Pacific University because of the football team, the excellent arts programs, and the proximity to Los Angeles. While he enjoyed playing football at APU, Orme quit the team after just one year to focus on his studies and his passion for art. “God used football as a way to get me to come to APU,” he said. “It was a tough decision to give it up, but I know now it was the right choice.”
Although Orme had never done any filmmaking in high school, he was interested in the craft and decided to study cinematic arts at APU. During his freshman year, Orme quickly discovered many parts of filmmaking didn’t appeal to him through his cinema production class where he had to make three short films by himself. The arduous process of script-writing, filming, and production challenged Orme, but when he got to the cinematic arts lab, everything changed. “I downloaded all the files to my hard drive, put in my headphones, and started editing. I started watching tutorials around 5 p.m. because I didn’t know how to use the editing software,” he said. “I got lost in editing and when I looked up at the clock, it was already 5 a.m. I had accidentally worked through the night because I was having way too much fun making a movie.” After that night, Orme knew he wanted to pursue a career in editing.
With his calling realized, Orme found a mentor in adjunct professor Mickey Corcoran. Recognizing his talent, Corcoran took Orme under his wing and encouraged him to begin freelance editing. Corcoran connected Orme with professionals in the industry to help him get his foot in the door. “He basically served as a life coach for me, teaching me so many practical things like how to make a budget for all my monthly expenses, what rates I would need to charge for editing, how many freelance jobs I would need to take at those rates and so on,” Orme said. “Thanks to Mickey, I felt confident that I could be a successful freelance editor.”
Before graduating, Orme served as a film production intern for APU’s Office of University Relations (now the Division of Strategic Communication and Engagement). He helped create many videos featuring stories of APU students and faculty. Through this internship, he also built a connection with Chadwick Trentham who later founded West Productions. Through this connection, Orme landed his first opportunity to edit a commercial for GameWorks. “Chadwick liked the work I did on that commercial, so he kept giving me opportunities,” Orme said. Trentham also connected Orme with Conscious Minds Productions, a studio founded by APU alumni. “They gave me opportunities to edit commercials for Nike and Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime,” Orme said. “After I shared the edits I had done on those commercials on social media, people started reaching out with projects and it just kind of snowballed.”
With this work under his belt, Orme decided to reach out to Arrad Rahgoshay, a famous director at Riveting Entertainment. Although it took a couple months, Rahgoshay got back to him and asked him to interview. After the interview, Rahgoshay gave Orme a chance to edit a music video. Impressed by his work, Rahgoshay decided to give Orme another project, then another, and soon Orme was frequently editing videos for him. Orme would go to his office, pick up a hard drive with all the video footage and music on it, drive home, and spend the next two days editing music videos for top artists such as Swae Lee and Becky G, then go back to the office and edit it again with Rahgoshay and sometimes the artists themselves. “As an editor, you just try to execute. During my first pass, I make what I think the video should be. Then it becomes a collaborative experience with the director’s cut before going to the artists and the label,” Orme said. “It was a lot of fun working on those videos. But after a while, I got tired of executing other people’s vision for their videos.” Wanting to start sharing his own story instead of telling others’, Orme began saying no to more and more opportunities, despite the high pay. He focused on his YouTube channel and started getting millions of views for his video edit breakdowns.
While viewers can learn a lot of tips from Orme’s channel, the editing process involves far more than he could convey through his breakdown videos. So he decided to create an online course called The Editing Formula, a video editing masterclass for any software. In the course, Orme demonstrates the step-by-step process of editing a video from start to finish, explains the decision making psychology behind the edits he made in videos, gives advice that he learned from Corcoran and others in the industry, and provides 8k RAW footage and sound effects for people to follow along and put the instruction into practice. “You come out of the course having edited a full commercial and part of a music video,” Orme said. “I call it The Editing Formula because it’s the same one I use and you can use it every time to make great edits.” More than 1,000 people have completed his course and are using it in their art.
Orme found enjoyment imparting his knowledge through the course and through sharing video edit breakdowns on his YouTube channel, yet he longed for something more. It was around this time he was convicted by the Holy Spirit.
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After the epiphany in his car, Orme read the Bible and other Christian books and spent time with God in prayer every day. “The idea of gaining the world but losing your soul and picking up your cross daily really became real to me for the first time,” he said. “I felt God telling me that he’d given me skills to make art as worship to Him.” Orme decided to create a second YouTube channel called Jordan Kalé (his middle name) which will focus on how Christ is working in his life, including being a loving partner to his wife Ashley ’22, and how he’s learning to be more like Jesus. Orme includes a link at the bottom of all the videos on his original channel to a page on his website called Why Jesus, which shares his testimony and invites people to begin a relationship with Christ. “I used to define success in very worldly ways, like how much money I was making off my edits and how many views my videos were getting. But if I never edited another video or if nobody watched my original channel anymore, that’s okay,” Orme said. “Now I know that if my life looks like Jesus, if I’m following the word of God, and if I’m sharing my faith with others, that’s the most successful thing I can do.”