Here are four different ways that we can pay the bills while making films.
There are still a lot of companies out there that don't have a promotional
video on their website and even more who could really do with an upgrade.
I think the best way to get started is to make an advert for free. That way you
can build up your show reel and make some contacts. You probably know some
people who work for, or own, a small business, so why not ask them if you can
make a video for their website?
No charges. After a few of those you'll have the always difficult task of deciding
how much your work is worth.
Let's say someone asks you your rates for a project. You can say: "Well, that depends."
This is an example of how you can offer them a price range dependent on how much
time you're going to spend preparing, shooting and editing. This way you are
less likely to lose a potential client by quoting them something that's either
way too high or way too low for their budget and you can kind of factor into
the conversation as you find out more about what the project is going to
involve. But my main tip would be to avoid the mistake that I made which was
just making really boring corporate interviews with B-roll.
I think a lot of people kind of get stuck in this, but next time I make a
promo video I'm going to try and take inspiration and aim for something that's
closer to the Superbowl ads which are, you know, entertaining and interesting,
rather than just having someone read out a list of why you should use their
company or buy their products.
The path I'm most interested in, though, is making narrative films without the
profit focused
movie studios making change to the film based on their focus groups. Now paying
for the film ourselves isn't really sustainable unless you're a
millionaire. But there are ways that we can generate revenue from our films: We
can turn on pre-roll ads on YouTube which actually earned me a total of
17 dollars after the first year.
That's 30 cents per video
So you'll really need a lot of views if AdSense is going to be your full-time job.
Other options are sponsorships pay-per-view and crowdfunding but again
these all kind of depend on us having a lot of people watching our stuff.
So we've just got to start putting stuff out there. Some people do commercial work
to pay their bills and then do the narrative projects on the side, but
either way we've got to be fully prepared to invest a lot of time and a lot
of money into making our films with absolutely no guarantee that it will
ever make us any profit.
Next is the traditional Hollywood way of doing things and it's not something I
have experience with so I'll keep this brief.
We've all heard that the traditional film industry is all about contacts, so
it's fighting for the chance to be a runner on a film set
where you're making coffee for the crew, will probably have to volunteer on some
pretty terrible films but completely lose our ego, stay one hundred percent
positive and professional in hopes that we might get hired
next time. Now you might be able to tell that I'm not particularly excited about
this kind of path but I do think no matter what kind of filmmaker you want to be,
it's extremely worthwhile getting on a bigger film set
so you can see how other crews work. I've only done this once, but I met a guy
who is now producing my short film,
so it's definitely something I should be doing more often.
A nice combination of commercial and independent filmmaking is selling stock
footage on Pond5. The best way to think of it is that you're just practicing
cinematography using framing and lighting to make images that people
would want to use. And, since Pond5's agreement is not exclusive,
we can still use the footage for showreels or for our own projects.
If you can nail the framing and the lighting you'll do pretty well. Now they do have 4
million clips,
so you'll need to make yours stand out and one of the best ways to do that is to film
unique things. Cool locations that you might live near, machines and little
props that you might be able to find at a junkyard for example, or why not just
upload some footage you've already shot if it's just sitting on your hard drive,
doing nothing?
Might as well help it to pay for your next film. Speaking of which I managed to
get 50 free clips from Pond5 that we can all use in any of our projects. You can click
right here to get them, or, it's linked in the description. Now for a lot of people
the ultimate goal in life is to be paid to do what they love.
That does sound pretty good, but doesn't that put too much emphasis on the money? For
example, Pond5 did pay me to let you know about those 50 free clips, but that money
is going straight into the budget of my next short film that we're working on.
I think that's the way it's got to be. That we're making films, not for profit,
but so we can continue to make the next one.
I think Casey Neistat summed it up best. Don't make films
so you can make money, make money so that you can make films.
My name is Simon Cade, this has been DSLRGuide, and I'll see you next week.