the creative portfolios that got me hired

so what am I talking about today I don't know got a light camera I'm up in the bunky I've got a laptop like what else do you need in fact I don't need you so scram get [Music] out what am I doing you know what I'm doing I'm updating my website it's wildly out of date and because I'm such a loser I'm procrastinating by making a YouTube video I start thinking about what even is a portfolio what even is Art what is life who am I what is the internet so what is a portfolio I wonder why I need a portfolio and then I remember I like making things and as long as I'm making things I'm happy but I also have a family to feed so why not make money feed my family doing the things I enjoy and to earn money doing things that I enjoy things like photography film making creative stuff I need a portfolio so first let's start with what's not a portfolio what's not a portfolio is your Instagram feed or wall your Tik Tok thing or whatever I've had young photographers or filmmakers send me those as an example of their portfolio or their work and it's a big red flag it means you're not serious and you could argue that a a single social media post could Define a creative person's career but we all like using these extreme wildly rare cases to Define what we're doing or maybe to just as an excuse to not put in the work but who am I I'm looking for excuses to not put in the work either but you know you and me we're going to be honest with each other so like Instagram and even what I'm doing here on YouTube these things are all supplementary or complimentary to my main portfolio they round out the bigger picture of who you are you know when when a client or someone who wants to work with you is sort of scoping out whether you're a total weirdo or not whether they want to be in the same room with you if you don't want to be in the same room with me I totally get it I wouldn't either so if you want to take yourself seriously and believe me I'm a serious person you need a portfolio if you want to get out of that non-committal hobbyist world that stage of screaming into your pillow at night wondering why isn't everyone just enamored with your creative self without you putting in any work then you need a portfolio there is no shortcut so if you don't have a portfolio you can start today and if you do um so fundamentally an artists or creatives or photographers portfolio is an edited collection of works that represent you as a creative person and if you're a photographer I'm going to ask you to ignore the misuse of the word editing in the everyday day world around you online where editing seems to have replaced processing or retouching very technical tasks what I'm talking about is taking a critical look at the pieces of work that you've created and putting them together into a cohesive unit to represent you as a creative person so editing that I use in this video is a a way higher level term it's basically weeding out all of the weak pieces and just showcasing what best represents you or what best represents where you want want to go with your work in the future it's what people will judge you on and whether or not they want to work with you we know what a portfolio is we know the importance of editing your own work do you want to see some samples from my portfolio I don't have much from my college entrance portfolio I think it's at my parents house so maybe we'll go see if we can find it it was a big quartero case my mom helped me so it had bad paintings in it from high school i' also had band posters that I designed for local bands and even like I had a piece that was a panorama of my bedroom my teenager bedroom it was a ridiculous room but even then I knew that I needed to give people a wider sense of who I was as a person rather than just like simple paintings or something I always wanted to let people know that ideas were important to me Beyond everything else so this portfolio got me accepted into to design school which was pretty cool so I I went through a three-year course in design and a couple weeks before the end of my third and final year I went on a tour of an ad agency it was pretty cool they were making hilarious commercials just goofing off and I knew I wanted to be an advertising it's adjacent to design but advertising wants to hire you on the quality of your ideas so I spoke to a guy at a really great agency in the city and he recommended two books to read and and a portfolio review that was 2 weeks away so in my last 2 weeks of college I essentially scrapped my design portfolio and started from scratch and in 2 weeks I had a completely new portfolio this is like early 2000s everything is still very analog and so I had a printed book that had sample campaigns it was just proof that I could come up with funny ideas and spread them across a few different executions so out of that 2E portfolio I ended up working in advertising it got me hired I moved jobs a couple times in in my advertising career but really I knew that I wanted to get out of the coming up with ideas and into the executing ideas sort of world so I decided to make a move into photography so in order to become a photographer I needed a photo portfolio and I didn't have much I just had kind of interesting snapshots I'd taken along the way so I basically gave myself a portfolio building project which at the time and it really dates myself was a food blog where my wife and I we were just starting to have kids and suddenly worried about the type of food we were feeding our kids so we started you know Finding local food at farms and going on these excursions and they were half to find food but mostly just excuses for me to bring my camera along to document things and more importantly to ask people who didn't necessarily want to be photographed for portraits to get over that that little speed bump you know I didn't want to be a street photographer who's just taking photos of people from afar I knew I needed to get over myself approach people talk to them ask them for a portrait and then direct them into a nice portrait I didn't really tend to worry about whether they liked it or not I was just focused on whether I liked it or not I was working with an agent I knew in the city to help give me advice to build up my portfolio Lisa helped me shape in into something that would sell it coincided right at the time where this farmtotable and organic food movement was just sort of becoming popular where everyone every corporation wanted to let everyone know how close to Nature they were whether it was true or not but along the way my portfolio really stood out because I had authentic stories of people actually creating food and feeding people so these blog portraits that I did became the foundation of my portfolio and they're still in there to this day some of my first portfolio reviews were in physical printed printouts we would go to an agency do a presentation show our work talk about it with potential creatives at agencies and it was really nice CU you get to know people in a really interesting way but things have changed It's All Digital but I still still try my hardest to get in front of [Music] people now I'm firmly in the digital age I call myself a director/ photographer so my website my portfolio gets called a few things from a commercial perspective a production company that is interested in hiring you as a director they'll ask to see my real it's essentially my commercial portfolio my film portfolio the nice thing about having a production company that represents you they're sort of like an agent is they'll take your videos from you and put them on their own website so they'll essentially create a portfolio if you're super talented and you're just doing incredible pieces in a production company is interested in you you often don't even need your own website you can just let them put that real together but there's a little bit of danger in letting the commercial side of your creative life control your portfolio that's why a personal website is important because it lets you reflect on your work rearrange it see what you're doing see how you've grown and also organize it in a way that looks forward to the future to how you want to present yourself and how you want to be seen out of that blog movement I started getting pigeon hold as a director who does real people documentary style commercials and while they were really fun I got to travel all over the place and it was a blast the work itself I never found as interesting as just a comedy commercial where I'm on set trying not to urinate because I'm laughing so hard [Music] as I moved through my career those are the moments I missed so this exercise in me rebuilding my website is really to push me into doing more comedic stuff you may have seen the Sasquatch video that I did with Maddie that's the world I want to live in just doing goofy stuff so portfolio it makes you really know your own work it really helps you know what you've done and who you are as a person it also prepares you for requests as they come in I often get requests from a producer who asks does he work well with kids or does has he shot food before and I have a lot of hidden galleries already prepared cuz I get requests like that all the time so I can give people a custom tailored portfolio that really puts them at ease and makes me write for the project and it makes me really easy to sell to their client so while I have a half decent Instagram following not much it doesn't really matter and while it feels good to get likes on photos I post there when I compare my actual website traffic to that I get next to nothing on my website but I do know that the few clicks that I have are really high value clicks they're the clicks where a client or an ad agency producer or team of creatives are taking a sneak peek at my work and deciding where to spend a bunch of money because it's all about the money [Music]

Channel: Jesse Senko

Views: 3,642

Keywords: portfolio, art portfolio, instagram, filmmaking, photography, photo printing, art, graphic design, Film photography, Exhibiting, Photo book, Reel

Id: twF-vFH2tuU

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023