This YouTube profile/interview follows JJ Saiko, a 32-year-old video editor from Santo Tomas, Batangas, who links his love of music and woodworking to his work as a creator. The video covers his childhood in a large, low-income family, his training and early career as a train mechanic, punk-music roots (Green Day, Blink-182) and band experience, and his transition to online video editing—working two years editing long-form (YouTube, courses) and short-form (TikTok, reels) content for an Amazon seller/coach based in Vancouver. It also recounts the COVID-19 (March 2020) disruption that prompted his resignation from the rail line and his move to online work, which he credits with providing time/location freedom and enabling him to buy a house.
Questions this video answers
32 years old
Santo Tomas, Batangas, Philippines
Two years
March 2020
Chapters
How important is music in your life? Music is like color. If there is no music, there is no color. When I'm not working, I play guitars and do woodworking. Hi. This is my one of the creation, my working desk. It is made by 34 Marine Plywood. So I made this stove tattoo made of 34 marine plywood. So I laminated it. And this 12 liter. It's a modular cabinet. It gives emotion to every act. When you feel sad, you listen to music. You feel happy, listen to music. Having no music in a video is like very tasteless food. Hi, I'm JJ Saiko, 32 years old from Santo Tomas, Batangas. I'm an online Filipino specialist working as a video editor. I'm doing it for two years now. I edit videos for Amazon seller. An investor and a coach from Vancouver, Canada. I do long form and short form videos. For long form I do his YouTube and his coaching course. For short form, I do TikTok and reels. I grew up in small town here in Batangas in Talisay. It's very hard to live there. The electricity there is intermittent. When I was a kid, when I'm doing my assignment, I do it in a candlelight. I have seven brothers, so total of eight. My mother is a housewife and my father is in a metal company. He resigned because of he needs to be amputated because of the diabetes. He landed a job in barangay. So he do a secretarial job. There was this time that we have no meat, even no rice. We just need to eat the vegetable from our garden. I need to take the exam. You cannot get the exam if you didn't pay the tuition. It's very hard for my mother and father to have that kind of money. That money can feed us. But instead my mother gave it to me and said, you take that money, you take the exam. Don't worry about our food. We can survive. We only eat vegetables without rice. So that I'll be able to pay for my tuition as a student. I'm more of an average student. I prefer music, actually play and guitar. I do vocals before and even drums. Growing up, I listened to punk music. Green Day Blink 182. I want to be a musician. Actually I strive to be a musician. I learn how to play well. We have a band from third year to fourth year and we practice almost every day. When I was college, I didn't pursue for being a musician. My family don't want me to pursue it because it's a waste of time for them. I Took railway engineering instead. I am a train mechanic. After I graduated, we do wheel measuring, changing oil, the gearbox of the train, fixing doors. At first, yeah, I love it because of the colleague and the friendship I built there. For the first five years I was happy. But after a couple of years, I feel like I'm lost. Should I be there for my whole life? For me to be able to not to be sad. My girlfriend and I, we do traveling, hiking and going to the beach. We scheduled it once a month. At first I like filming, but I really didn't recognize. I love editing it. Eventually I decided to edit it so that I have a compilation of it. So that I won't miss the travel. Oh, I remember this video. It's kind of feeling very fascinating. Creating a very wide variety of emotion using your video and your music. 2020 was struggling year. March hits pandemic. Everything is in a halt. We cannot move. We cannot even go outside of the house. Working in a train line, we feel like we are the first phase to face the people. April, they want us to report for the work. We are four in a team. Three of them. It's the first case in the COVID and they died. It makes me feel very unsafe. Me and my family actually decided to resign. And then after that, I decided to search for an online job that can sustain you. After two years of working, my wife and I and our boss got very close together. Our terms of endearment for him. Now it's not boss, but it's Coach. We call him Coach. We're close because he includes us during his travel. He sends us pictures of him. He wanted to go here in the Philippines to meet us for a vacation with us. We actually acquired house because of online jobs. First I was dreaming. Freedom of time, freedom of location. I can work anywhere. I can work anytime. Online jobs give me that dream come true.
