Often the hardest thing about shooting video professionally is finding people who will hire you.
Learning how to shoot and picking up some gear is easy, but making sure you have enough clients to keep your schedule full and making enough money to support yourself is difficult.
If you are in the early stages of freelancing or your own production company you might need a little help.
absorb media has pulled this off and is now sharing their tips in regards to finding work. You’ll need to put some work into getting the ball rolling but it can be very rewarding once you get your production company off the ground.
1. Approach Churches (House of Worship)
One way to get started in video production is to volunteer at your local church (or more generally, a house of worship).
A lot of churches have some sort of internal team for producing their video or at least one person they can call on to help out. Some can even have full on Hollywood-quality crews to do their services.
Churches always seem to have something going on and want to share it online these days.
Even if they have their basics covered if you reach out you may be able to help out and start networking if not even start getting paid to do the work.
This is good if you are very early in your video career and need to give it a jumpstart. You’ll be able to start building up your portfolio and collect references.
2. Non-Profit Organizations
The next step up is working with non-profits. This is their personal favorite and it makes a lot sense.
You can choose your non-profits based on their work and whether it is something that you would like to support as well.
Non-profits, especially bigger ones, do have budgets to do video work and promotion so while some you might want to volunteer and help out others might actually start getting you paid jobs.
Since non-profits are so eager to get the message out they are often very receptive to offers for help in video production.
The more work you do the better your portfolio and the more potential references you’ll have.
3. Car Shows
Depending on where you are located you may have car shows or other types of trade shows in the area.
Local businesses often can use promotional assets to help out with their displays. For car shows, this might mean local retailers or mechanics who could use quick montages of some of their work to show off.
This is great since it will get the videos you make in front of a lot of local people and companies that could potentially hire you.
You could take it a step further and do trade show coverage, maybe even for the show itself, but even on your own doing on-the-spot interviews and B-roll to put together into a nice piece can be a great addition to your portfolio.
For car shows a lot of people do have stories behind their personal cars and how they got them or why they chose them so it is a nice idea for where to start. Throwing the final video(s) up in community pages on social media is a great way to promote yourself.
You’ll need to make sure your setup is solid since getting good footage and interview audio on the show floor can be a challenge. Audio is so important here and can ruin your video if you don’t nail it.
4. Spec Ads
Spec ads are something a lot of beginner and veteran videographers make since they can be fun, good practice, and a great way to get new clients. Spec ads are fake ads you make for a product that you were not hired to make.
Making a spec ad for a brand is a good way to expand your portfolio and seems to be an excellent option to get attention from the brand (or related brands).
By showing off exactly what you could do with their product it can make the decision to hire you much easier for them.
Almost any type of product or company can be approached with spec ads and they can be so much fun to do.
Just make sure you are getting your own website set up to host your portfolio work.
5. Do Work for Free
This is far from the favorite way to get clients, but working for free can sometimes get you in the door for more work in the future or at the very least help you get more done for your portfolio.
If you want to work with a certain type of business and don’t have proper access or equipment for making something like a spec ad, you can offer to work for them for free to get something done that you can show to more places in the future.
A better way to handle this is to offer discounts on your work before going all the way to free, but if you are struggling to get in the door then it may be a good option.
Be careful here though because people will take advantage of the situation and you can’t keep yourself afloat if you only do free work.
There is some good information here for getting started as a freelancer or with your own production company. Do you have any tips of your own?
[source: absorb media]
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