The Fastest Way to Get New Filmmaking Clients

in the world of filmmaking especially when you're trying to do it professionally there's a weird Catch-22 situation that a lot of new filmmakers find themselves in where they can't get the jobs or the clients that they want when they're first getting started because they don't have the work samples to prove that they can do the job like if you're trying to shoot documentaries most doc directors won't take a chance on you if you haven't already shot a documentary or maybe if you want to do car commercials or something if you don't have car commercials on your reel you won't be considered but if you can't get the gigs in the first place then how are you supposed to have examples to show it's a really frustrating problem that all filmmakers struggle with myself included luckily there is a way to break that weird cycle and position yourself as a serious Contender for the jobs you want even if you've never booked a job before I've had to reinvent myself multiple times in my career like when I decided to transition from photography to video and had no work samples to show and then again when I moved back to Canada for Mexico in both situations I use the exact same method to get around this annoying new guy bias and in this video I'm going to share the three-step strategy I've used to break into new markets and get the jobs I want without any experience hey guys welcome back and if you're new here my name is Luke Forsyth and on this channel I teach the skills I've learned over 10 years working as a documentary filmmaker and photographer now that I've been in the media world for a long time and have quite a few big name clients under my belt it might be easy to think that I just get handed job after job and it's all smooth sailing but the truth is that I've had to reinvent myself multiple times over the course of my career and every time I had to deal with the same problem that a lot of you are probably familiar with like how to get your first jobs when you don't have a professional track record people only want to hire people who've already done what they're looking for and so how are you supposed to break in when no one will give you a chance I dealt with this when I was trying to establish myself as a photojournalist and again when I moved from photo into video and then a third time when I moved back to Canada from Mexico and it was annoying every single time I've already talked quite a bit about how I switch from photo into video but I haven't shared so much about what it was like to come back to Canada so I'll focus on that for now but the process was exactly the same regardless of the medium or or the industry when I moved back in 2020 I had over a decade of experience working for big International clients like Netflix National Geographic the New York Times and a ton of others and I sort of hoped it would finally be easy but that wasn't the case at all for starters the market in Canada was very different from what I was used to in Mexico where I was in really high demand because I was already on location I spoke Spanish and I had a full gear package that didn't have to be flown in because of all the drug violence and immigration issues that were so popular in the news cycle Mexico was also a really popular place to shoot especially for American production companies and so once I got established I found that a lot of work just sort of came my way but when I got to Canada I quickly found out that the American companies I was used to working for didn't shoot nearly as much stuff in Canada and my ability to speak Spanish didn't count for all that much and there were a lot of people around with Cinema cameras in fact the documentary industry in general in Canada was much smaller and was mostly focused on reality TV instead of the premium big budget docs I'd been used to working on and since I'm not really interested in shooting home renovation shows and shows about truck drivers I found myself not working very much at all in the beginning that lull is what actually led me to starting this YouTube channel which eventually turned into something bigger than I ever imagined and got me connected to a bunch of people like the sponsor of today's video audio but more on that later now even though I was back in Canada I still had great relationships with the New York production companies and I was still getting really interesting International jobs that kept me creatively engaged and satisfied my travel addiction but I did need to fill the gaps with domestic work or I would have had to travel like seven months of the year to make ends meet which is obviously not great for having a personal life so I had a good look around at what was being made other than reality and realized that branded content was a good option for someone with my skill set and that there was a fair bit of it being made if you don't know what I mean by that branded content is essentially making documentaries for companies who want story driven media rather than traditional ads and it uses a lot of the same skills that you need to be good at Doc work getting more branded jobs would mean that I could stay busy supplement my income between Big Dog shoots and not have to spend so much time in the airport so it seemed like the best solution in the short term the problem was that even though I knew I could do it I couldn't really prove it because I'd already gone through this process multiple times like I said I knew exactly what to do so I took a deep breath and got to work [Music] I started by making myself a master list of all the people I thought would be good to work with and that's going to be the first step in this process identifying the potential clients depending on what you're trying to do that could be documentary production companies independent directors or commercial agencies like I was going for in this case at first I tried to reach out to just the agencies I found on Google but I pretty much knew what they'd say your documentary work samples are super cool but this isn't what clients are looking for don't you have any commercial work to show I'm not gonna lie I'm moped around for a few days feeling sorry for myself but I kind of already knew what I had to do because I'd already done it several times and that's going to be the second step in this process you're gonna have to shoot spec projects in the same style as the work you're going for the spec project if you don't know that term is basically just a fancy way of saying self-funded and self-produced work that's intended for a specific audience when I started in photojournalism my spec projects were photo essays that I shot on my own so that when editors at newspapers contacted me I could Point them to a website with multiple completed stories on it it didn't matter if I hadn't been paid for them they just needed to see that I had the skills they were looking for then later when I was trying to move away from photo and into video I did more spec projects by producing a series of short films about environmental issues in Mexico City no one had asked for them and I barely even tried to sell them the whole point was to film my website with video so that anyone wanting to hire me knew that I could actually do it in Vancouver even though I'd been working with cameras for most of my adult life I had to do exactly the same thing and shoot spec projects that were oriented towards branded content looking at my website everyone could see that I knew how to do documentary work but could I shoot more Moody stylized stuff that was in line with what the agencies were looking for I knew I could but without spec work to prove it no one would just take my word for it so I reached out to everyone I knew in town and asked them if they had any friends with small businesses who might want a free commercial made for their social media after a while some of them took me up on it and then I went out and shot the things one of my favorites I did was for a small bike repair shop that I both wrote shot and directed and used a friend as the on-screen talent I rented a smoke machine and a dolly because I wanted a slightly different look than my normal stuff and we made the whole thing in I think one or two afternoons for a total budget of under 300 bucks I'm not going to say it was easy because there was a lot of planning and editing that went into it but within a week or so I had a nice one minute commercial piece that I could show to new clients and also give the bike shop so that they could promote themselves when doing spec work I think it's a great idea to try and think small I made that bike ad under a minute both because the shop said they wanted something they could put on Instagram but also because I needed to get it done without killing myself so when you're looking for your own spec projects to shoot try to find things that are close to home and can be done in a couple of days the point here isn't to produce your magnum opus it's to get a variety of samples together as quickly as possible so you can start Landing gigs whether those are in docs or narrative or commercials or any other sector of the filmmaking world you might be interested in so don't plan a shoot on the other side of the world for this think local and keep it manageable another thing that's really important when doing spec work is having access to high quality royalty-free music because if you want to be able to share your spec stuff without having it flagged for copyright issues you can't just use any song you want and that's a pretty smooth segue into today's sponsor if I do say so myself and that's audio when you're putting together short pieces like this the music is going to be really important in terms of setting the mood and the pace of the whole thing with audio I have access to thousands and thousands of tracks but there are lots of other royalty-free sites out there with huge quantities of music to choose from so why is audio any different well for me it comes down to two main points the first is that audio's library is incredibly well curated rather than focus on sheer volume they focus on quality instead that's not to say that there aren't a lot of tracks to choose from because I think they're getting close to 10 000 or something like that but there's just not nearly as much junk as I sometimes find with other sites that might have way more in terms of just sheer numbers to choose from now having less music might sound like a bad thing but for me it's actually a positive thing because I want to spend as little time as possible scrolling through music lists so I can just start editing instead so by tightly curating their list instead of overwhelming me with Choice audio makes this part of the process quite a bit easier and it's something I actually really appreciate about it secondly is the price audio is so much more affordable than pretty much any of the other music options out there and if you use the code Luke 70 they're giving viewers of this channel a massive 70 discount on a Year's subscription making the full price for their full library of music and sound effects just 59 bucks a year if you've ever signed up for royalty-free music before you'll know that these Services normally cost like 200 or more which still isn't bad but it's also not cheap fifty nine dollars is hands down the best deal out there and I honestly didn't think they'd be able to keep this deal going for very long but I've been working with them for around six months now and somehow they found a way to keep it crazy affordable who knows how long that will last though so you might want to jump on the deal before they raise the prices but for what you get it is in same value and more than just respect work every single YouTube video I've made for months now has been made using only audio music so it's been a super useful resource across all parts of my work I personally haven't needed anything else since I started working with them and for most of you out there I think it's the best deal around all right back to the video foreign I personally think three is the magic number when it comes to promotion there's just something about giving lists of three that works well like when I'm writing my BIOS about my documentary work I might say Luke Forsythe is a director and cinematographer who has worked with clients like Netflix National Geographic and the New York Times for example threes just seem more real somehow and with three samples you're way less likely to get someone coming back with anything else so if you're just starting out my best advice is to shoot three of these spec projects in whatever style you're trying to break into and then make a new section on your website or Vimeo or whatever and upload them if you can more is probably better here and as I'm working with my mentorship student DUI we said an even more ambitious goal of six shorts done by the end of the year a lot of work for sure but at the end of the year he's going to have a solid portfolio and people will take him seriously because he's proven he can do it once you've got your three spec projects uploaded somewhere and ready to share the final step of the process is pretty simple share the work with everyone you identified in Step One it helps to cast a wide net here and write out a boilerplane email that you then tweak a little to personalize it to different people something that just says who you are what kind of work you do and then a link to those samples now if you've just made three two-minute spec documentaries it might not make sense to send them to the VP of production at Netflix or something so be a little realistic with who you target here but get them out there as much as you possibly can the worst thing they can do is ignore you I'm not saying you're going to get work overnight with this and it might take a while for the gigs to start rolling in for me I sent out my branded content samples to as many of the different kinds of agencies as I could and after about six months it started to work keep in mind that I wasn't looking to totally transition into the commercial world just supplement my doc work with a bit more local stuff and it did exactly what I wanted I landed a series of jobs with a health Foundation a reoccurring gig with a European agency specializing in development profiles and even a spot shooting for National Geographics branded content division so while I'm by no means a full-time commercial DP and I don't really want to be I've opened up a totally new sector of work for myself that I was never really really in the running for before so no matter what kind of filmmaking work you're hoping to do this process has worked over and over again for me to get my foot in the door when I have little to no relevant experience to back me up and if it works for me it can also work for you now obviously there's a lot more to it than just three simple steps and there's all sorts of knowledge and experience that goes into finding the right project shooting it properly getting the edit right and then promoting it but these are the basics and they really do work that's it for this video thanks for watching and I hope you got some ideas and motivation to get out there and get your own spec projects going so good luck and happy shooting see ya [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Luc Forsyth

Views: 16,278

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Id: ts94d-IDLT0

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023