DaVinci Resolve + iPhone coach: teach me to shoot, grade, and cut short-form social media content

I own a marketing agency. I will eventually hire a creator to run my content, but I refuse to hire for a role I do not understand. I want to learn the full pipeline well enough to write the brief, direct the shoot, evaluate the edit, and know when someone is telling me something is hard when it is not. I am not trying to become a content creator. I am trying to become the person a creator cannot bluff. THE OBJECTIVE One shoot, three cuts. I need to walk out of a shoot at my office or a client's job site with footage that becomes a TikTok, an Instagram Reel, and a YouTube piece, each cut to the right length and pacing for that platform. And it needs to look shot, not captured. Cinematic is the standard, phone-footage-with-captions is not. MY SETUP iPhone 15 Pro with the Blackmagic Camera app, Tilta Khronos rig, ND filters, Freewell 1.33x anamorphic adapter, Ulanzi U60 RGB light, tripod and mini tripod, lav mic. Footage in Blackmagic Cloud. Editing in DaVinci Resolve on a MacBook Air M5. I own good gear and do not know how to use most of it. WHAT I NEED TO LEARN, IN PIPELINE ORDER 1. HOOKS AND IDEAS. How hooks are actually constructed, the formats that work, how to write ten and know which one to shoot. How to build a repeatable idea pipeline instead of staring at a blank page. 2. SCRIPTING. How to script a reel: structure, pacing, retention beats, where the turn goes, how to land a CTA without it feeling like an ad. How scripting changes for a 20 second TikTok versus a 90 second Reel versus a longer YouTube cut. 3. CAMERA SETTINGS. The Blackmagic Camera app specifically: frame rate, shutter angle, ISO, white balance, exposure, when to shoot log, when the ND goes on, and how the anamorphic adapter changes what I should be doing. 4. CINEMATIC SHOOTING TECHNIQUE. This is the part I most want to get right. Lighting: key, fill, negative fill, motivated sources, how to make one RGB light look intentional instead of flat. Composition and blocking. Depth and subject separation. Camera movement that means something: push in, parallax, handheld versus locked off, and when stillness beats movement. Coverage and b-roll that actually cuts together. What I can and cannot pull off without a gimbal. 5. TWO REPEATABLE SETUPS. (a) An office set for talking-head content: lighting, background, sound, camera position, so I can walk in and shoot without rethinking it. (b) A run-and-gun job site setup: bad light, wind, machinery noise, moving subjects, no time. 6. AUDIO. Lav versus on-camera, getting clean sound in an untreated room and on a noisy site, and how to fix what I can in post. 7. COLOR GRADING IN RESOLVE. Not just dropping a LUT on and calling it done. Node structure and why it matters, reading scopes, balancing exposure and contrast, correcting before grading, skin tones, matching shots across a shoot so the piece feels like one thing, power windows, and building a consistent house look for my brand that I can export as a LUT and reuse. Log to finished image, start to end. 8. EDITING IN RESOLVE. Cutting for retention rather than for chronology. Music and sound design. Pacing. 9. CAPTIONS, EDITABLE. Not one locked template. I want to build and modify caption styles myself: fonts, sizes, outlines, drop shadows, backgrounds, word-by-word animation, hook text on screen. Trends move and I need to move with them without hiring someone every time. 10. TRANSITIONS, CLEAN. Whip pans, match cuts, speed ramps, masked and match-frame transitions, J and L cuts, and how much of it is planned in-camera versus built in post. I do not want the stock CapCut preset look. I want work that reads as deliberately shot and cut. 11. PLATFORM DELIVERY. How the same shoot becomes three different cuts. Length, hook timing, aspect and safe zones, captions burned in versus uploaded, export settings for each platform. 12. GEAR PATH. What a real camera would actually change versus my current rig, what I should buy in six to twelve months and why, and what I should not waste money on. 13. THE DELEGATION LAYER. This is the part I care most about. What a good creative brief looks like. What to ask for in raw footage handoff. How to critique an edit and a grade in language a professional respects. What is a fair rate and a fair turnaround. What is genuinely hard versus what someone is inflating. WHAT I WANT TO WALK AWAY WITH - A shot list and script template I reuse. - A lighting and settings cheat sheet specific to my rig and my two setups. - A house LUT and grading node tree for my brand. - A Resolve template project with caption styles, transitions, color setup, and export presets I can modify myself. - A hiring brief template for when I bring on a creator. FORMAT Four to six live sessions, roughly 90 minutes each, using my gear and my footage, not exercise files. At least one session should be you critiquing footage I shot between sessions. I will screen record for my own reference. WHAT I NEED FROM YOU - You shoot AND edit AND grade your own work. Please link three pieces you personally made start to finish, ideally including something shot on a phone. - You can explain choices, not just execute them. Teaching is the job here. - Comfortable being screen recorded. - Pacific time availability. BUDGET Hourly. Give me your rate and your estimate of total hours. I would rather pay well for someone genuinely good at explaining than save $20 an hour. SCREENING QUESTIONS 1. Link one piece you shot, cut, and graded. Tell me the hook, how you lit it, and what you would change. 2. Someone shoots on a phone and it looks cheap. Someone else shoots on a phone and it looks cinematic. What are the actual differences, in order of impact? 3. Walk me through your grading process on a log clip from a phone. What does your node tree look like and why? Note: I also record longer-form interview content at my office that gets cut into clips. Not the focus of this engagement, but tell me if that is in your wheelhouse.