DRHOBS: a six-episode Lebanon series, edited while the family was still travelling

Guy Hobaika runs DRHOBS, a family vlog channel built around his daughter Amara. In September he took the family to Lebanon to see where he comes from, and he wanted the trip out as a series while it was still happening.

That’s the whole brief. He films, sends the footage, and gets on with the trip. I do everything else.

The ask

Six episodes from one trip, each out fast enough that the series felt live. First class flight, the food, Saint Charbel, Amara’s first time in the ocean, meeting her 90-year-old great-grandmother, the last day.

What made it hard

• The brief changed shape three times. On the first episodes Guy renamed every clip so the filename was the instruction (“cut right after he says change your diaper”). Then he started cutting sections himself in Premiere and leaving markers. By episode 5 the notes were voice memos on WhatsApp and lines he said to me on camera mid-vlog. I read every one of them and did what it asked.
• English and Arabic in the same sentence. Auto-transcription gets the Arabic and the names wrong, so every subtitle file was corrected by hand against the context. There are also two Tetas in this family, and they aren’t the same woman.
• Speed. A travel series goes stale if episode 3 lands after they’re home.

What I built

• 6 finished episodes, usually back in 24 hours and never more than 48.
• A house look he could recognise every week: a riser into black, a white title card, a hard cut into the next section, and a short intro montage of Amara up front.
• Subtitles delivered as a separate file, never burnt in, so he could fix a line himself.
• On the later episodes I edited live inside his own open Premiere project, so his notes and my changes happened on one timeline.
• Music kept low under speech. It was the only real note across the whole series, and I turned it into a fixed level for every episode after that.

What happened

Snapshot from his channel on 25 Sep 2026:

That’s 1.9 times the average views. The Lebanon episodes were 2 to 13 days old when I counted and the earlier ones had had one to two months, so the gap is on the conservative side.

I won’t claim the edit did all of that. A baby meeting her 90-year-old great-grandmother is a good story on any channel. What the edit did is get the story out while people still cared, in a shape they recognised from one episode to the next, without Guy losing a day of his holiday to it.

Legend!! Perfectt

Guy Hobaika, DRHOBS

What he got back

Every episode came back editable: a Premiere timeline, a subtitle file and a cut list. Nothing was baked in, so if he wanted to change something at 11pm in a hotel room, he could.

Next is the Italy trip.

This isn’t the first time I’ve worked on Guy’s content: he was one of the three creators behind The Lineup, whose Shorts I cut for a month. For another family channel on tight turnarounds, see Jancy Family. Filming a series and want it out while it’s still happening? Book a call, or send one episode as a single long-form edit.