How to Start Your Filmmaking Career With the Sony FX30!

if I was to start my creative career all over again in videography and even a little bit in photography I would still pick the Sony fx30 now I'm not going to go back into a review I'm not going to talk much about the gear of the camera but I'm going to talk about things that I would do if I was to start all over again but while using this camera we'll get into it now if I was to start all over again regardless of the camera I'm going to have one thing that I would figure out is how I actually solve the problems with video or photography or just using my camera in general a lot of times what ends up happening is that you'll watch a bunch of YouTube reviews you'll see a bunch of great footage you'll buy that camera that lens you'll buy the entire kit but you haven't thought about how you're actually going to make the money back now there is going to be a video about talking about 10 different ways that you can do that but one thing that you want to find out is how you actually solve problems by using video for different clients that could be anything from doing advertising shoots or actually shooting short documentaries or brand stories but you want to find out how you're going to use your unique style of film making in order to solve problems for clients that way you could actually make a little bit of that money back and you could also start your film making career because with more resources you can grow a little bit faster I'll give you an example I work a lot in the fitness industry with supplement companies and athleisure companies now a problem that I saw with them is that they didn't have a lot of videos that they could post regularly on social media currently right now I'm working with a company that does a lot of Google advertising so what we end up doing is every single month we have these ad shoots where we shoot a bunch of different scripts for a bunch of different products and those go out on Facebook ads every single week what's cool about that is that we solved the problem of having to generate a lot of advertising to see which one fits and at at the same time I could use cameras like the Sony fx30 in order to get that content because a lot of it's actually vertical now the second thing I would do if I was to start all over again is I would focus on my lighting a camera like the Sony fx30 is going to have a slightly smaller sensor than it is going to be on full frame which means that sometimes it's going to be hungry for light in order for you to get a good and a dynamic image also just in general as a cinematographer lighting is going to be one of your most useful tools and I wish I knew that beforehand instead of throwing my camera around and just hoping for the best another thing that I would pay attention to is things that are going to help my post production even faster when I'm starting out when I first started out in videography and film making I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants in terms of post-production I was trying new editing software all the time thinking it was going to change my situation I was trying this and that plugin thinking that it was going to change everything for me one thing that I would do if I was to start all over again is to do a lot more research in some of the tools and some of the plugins that I'm actually going to need now this video isn't sponsored but I do use a lot of plugins from motion V effects and the reason why I do that is because I use Da Vinci resolve now when working with client work a lot of the times the edits aren't going to be incredibly complicated which means things that I'm going to need are going to be stuff like zoom in Zoom outs lower thirds and I'm also going to need to brush up on my color grading to make images look as good as possible now the Sony fx30 does have 10 bit color which is great for getting great skin tones and making things look really nice but if I'm not investing times in finding out about the post-production of how I want things to look and how to make that process easier I'm always going to be bottlenecked with having too many client projects that I have to edit but not having things that make that process faster another thing that I would do is I probably wouldn't spend a ton of money trying to find the perfect L pack I get it they're great to use and it's great to also have different ways that you could Colorade your footage with one click as a starting point however for the most part after color grading a ton of stuff I only kind of use three to five LS anyways and that's kind of the reason why my L pack which is in the description down below only has about five LS that you can use for the most part I like to keep things pretty simple I like to keep things pretty consistent and once I found a color grade that I liked I'm just going to save it the only thing is is that I don't like to have 20 different color grades for my footage I like to stick to a finite number of them to make things a lot easier and it's also going to streamline things because I'm making a single decision based on a limited amount of color grades that I could pick from now we are talking about how we would start again with the Sony fx30 now I've also made a video about different kits that you could have for different jobs but overall you want to make sure that you buy what you need and you keep your kit consistent and you keep things tight the reason why you want to do that is you don't want to get overwhelmed with gear now this is also going to come from two sides of my mouth having this YouTube channel I get to try out a lot of gear so I have a lot of experience with things that I like like and things that I might not keep in my bag it might just be something I rent now coming from that experience at the same time I noticed that I only really want to keep about three lenses for any particular job at any given time if I want to shoot anamorphic I'm going to shoot three anamorphic lenses if I'm going to shoot corporate stuff I'm going to keep three corporate lenses so on and so forth now these don't have to be a matching set and you don't necessarily need to have everything if I was to start over again I would probably rent out a lot of the stuff that I either can't afford don't want to afford or don't need all of the time and that's going to help reduce the amount of money you're going to spend unnecessarily and at the same time you can still use high quality gear without paying a high quality price tag now another thing that I would do and this is going to be the bane of your existence if you don't get a handle on this and it's figuring out your music now you could use a variety of different music licensing Solutions and and I think we're a little bit spoiled because even 5 years ago there wasn't as many options as we have now figuring out the different types of music that you want to use the different types of sound effects that you want to use it's going to make your editing process a lot quicker if I was going to say that there's going to be one complaint that I had when I was starting in my career it was that email that said the video is great but can we just change the music if I did a little bit more research in terms of the music licensing that was available it'd be a little bit easier for me to pick really good tracks to minimize how often that's going to be emailed to you although doing that research I still got those emails and it still drove me insane now another thing that I would have done if I started all over again with the Sony fx30 is well ask around and tell a friend now this might be in the form of a text message or signing up a new social media account or putting an Instagram story out there but one thing that you can do because you're doing video and you're using a camera is actually send a video of you introducing your business as somebody that's going to be making videos this is a little bit more powerful it's one thing to just send a text message to your friends and family and to post up an Instagram story that's text only but it's another thing to actually use the camera and use that skill set to display that you could also make content for other people a way of doing this is actually documenting your Journey on YouTube and the progression that you have in your film making career but you could also just make a video on your camera with good audio and you could send it to a lot of your friends and that acts as kind of a digital business card that they could send to other people or they could share that way they also get to see you on camera using your camera rather than just kind of sharing a text message around where people actually don't know what the quality of your images are going to look like it's not an extravagant commercial however it might work a little bit better than sending a text message now speaking of Socials and documenting your journey if I was to start everything all over again actually I did this when I started from the beginning but I actually document a lot of things on social media like Instagram and YouTube I kind of wish I got into YouTube a little bit earlier but on Instagram I used to do things where I would document pretty much everything that I was doing in my film making and my photography it got so frequent that if I went missing anywhere between the years 2019 to all 2022 it would be completely the fault of everybody on Instagram because I documented everything I was doing which sets I was on where I was at who I was shooting with every single step of the way now if you've ever gone to a Subway sandwiches before one thing that they did which actually helps a little bit with the customer experience is they show people how their sandwich is actually going to be made now one thing that I took away from that is that you can show things like BTS your finish projects and just your thoughts about the tools that you use kind of like having a YouTube channel and you're able to display not only your skill set but things that you know about the craft which also helps clients actually figure out who they want to shoot between two people if you're excited about your craft and the things that you're doing then other people are going to be as well and if you're miserable through the entire process you can't really expect your clients to be happy either now if you're starting your career in film making content creation videography or whatever the case might be whether you're using the fx3 or any other camera you're going to get a lot of outside opinion there's going to be people that are going to feel the need to tell you how exactly to run your business there's going to be people that tell you how you're supposed to do pretty much everything every step of the way now instead of listening to those people that have zero videos posted up and three subscribers there's one thing that you can do and it's actually seeking a mentorship from people that have things that you want audience feedback is always great but taking those things with a grain of salt is going to be great on your mental Health if you try to listen to everybody's opinion under the guise that everybody's opinion is valid you're going to drive yourself insane one thing that I like to do is I actually ask people and colleagues and mentors that have something that I want maybe they have a particular sense of success maybe they have a particular look that I'm after or they just have a certain characteristic about themsel that I actually want to emulate and I want to find that confidence through my film making in my career and those are the people I typically will listen to the opinions of even though my comment section sometimes is full of people that just like hearing this sound of their own voice now I was going to offer some words of encouragement for new filmmakers or anybody starting out whether using the Sony fx30 or something else but I'm pretty sure you guys are sick of seeing my face in this Arrow all the time so I decid to ask a lot of my friends that started off in the same craft what they would do if they was to start all over everything again if I had to start my videography Journey over again knowing what I know now I would focus a lot more on setting up systems as I was going through my different projects so every time that I did a project project I'd be writing down or figuring out what the kind of most common things were that I needed to do or that helped things to be easier and I would be building those systems to make future projects easier so much now I'm kind of figuring those things out every time that I start a new project because I'm just starting without thinking too much about what's going on and I don't have those things already in place and once you get busier and busier with projects coming in and coming in or in my case YouTube videos that need to get made every week with deadlines and those kinds of things there's less time to actually build those systems as you go so that's the one thing that I would focus a lot more on if I was starting over when you have time at the start build those things up thanks again Kofi for having me on your channel and uh that's a really difficult question to answer is you know obviously what would I do if I had to start fresh and I think the biggest thing is starting with one main camera first so let's say the fx30 or the fx3 and you know a camera like this can go so far it is incredibly powerful and can pretty much give you image quality just like the larger Cinema cameras but it really comes down to narrowing down on mastering lights and how to shape lights and I really wish at first I really just started to knuckle down on light but I think that's one of the greatest things about me going to University is that I did study the importance of you know lighting and that's what really got me into how to light a scene what kind of lighting I needed to in a particular scene to evoke a motion so lighting is probably one of the most important things that I should have got into and purchased far more lights a lot earlier in my career but now I know how important it is because you can match up the fx30 or fx3 against a red Koto X in just lighting the scene much better and exposing the image better but I feel like when it comes to cameras I did progress over time Nikon d750 a73 uh A7 S3 fx6 so I did start to progress over time and if you've seen my channel then you probably would have seen the progression over time but yeah I think one camera one lens get a ton of lighting and just learn the basics first so if I start it over again knowing what I know now I would not buy the Sony fx3 we're shooting with it right now I would buy two of these this is the Sony fx30 and also I don't really shoot 4K 120 but the overall capabilities of the Sony fx30 is pretty good like I've done it for beauty shoots product shoots like this is a pure Workhorse and I would invest in Quality Lighting quality grip gear so that my C stands last for a long time don't buy those Amazon ones I mean they're okay but if you buy quality gear you're probably just going to buy it once and a solid tripod other than gear I would really just practice cinematography lighting skills angles composition colors whatever fits the mood of a story of a project I would just focus on that the story as well if you're doing some narrative work or even just commercials it really helps sound design learn that early and also a little bit of graphic design because where you place the textt is crucial for video production especially if you're doing captions titles whatever it is that's it for me like overall just practice your skills once you get really good quality gear now there's one last thing I want to talk about when we're talking about starting our filmmaking Journey all over again and it's to think a little bit bigger now this might be my own personal opinion and I don't know you feel free to disagree with me but I do think that in 2023 and Beyond a lot of people getting into videography and film making and content cre ation in general should think of themselves instead of just that particular role but you're now an owner of a multimedia company where you can do anything under the Sun including film making or videography if you want to do that camera gear review because you want to share the tools of a craft go ahead and do it if you want to do photography on the side because you're working on a short film and needs some money go for it if you want to do that podcast because you want to interact with other filmmakers and other people in the craft and you want to share those conversations by all means the way that I'm kind of thinking about my journey and how it's starting to evolve is I want to do more than just being on set and shooting and editing videos but I want to own a multimedia company where I'm able to do a lot of things and express myself creatively in a multitude of different ways I found that getting into cinematography a little bit more I feel a little bit detracted from other things that made me happy I don't do photos as much and every time I think about doing a live stream or a podcast interview I kind of step away from it because I have so many film making things coming up being a filmmaker is just a role but if you are somebody that's getting into this game you might want to think think of other things you might be interested in and incorporate your film making into that which also might spread out some of the energy and make your life a little bit easier now getting back to doing all of that we're going to start small we're going to start on the Sony fx30 and actually getting some video clients and start building our business but a way you have to do that is you're probably going to have to work for free which you could actually find out how to do properly in this video right over here [Music] peace [Music] you

Channel: Kofi Yeboah

Views: 16,853

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Id: LC9RqfuuAD4

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023