Proper way to advertise myself?

Rylan Zolinski

Rylan Zolinski

Well-known member
I've finally decided to use my skills and start advertising. Besides working on short films and having to make two videos for a company, I never bothered trying to do it for a job. I might be able to get a job that is unrelated to video work and it's casual work (pretty much any hours I want). I figured I could manager 20 hours a week or something and do filming for my second job. What would be a proper approach to advertising myself?

For starters, I live in a city with only 40,000 people. This worries me in that there may not be enough work to have any filming jobs. Second, I don't even know what to charge for rates or how rates really work. Basically, I would offer this:

-Film weddings
-Commercials
-Short films
-Basically anything...

I own a Canon XHA1, tripod (of course), an SGpro adapter, Rode NTG-2 Mic, etc. Basically the essentials including Sony Vegas for editing.

Where the hell do I begin?
 
Start with not calling it filming unless you are rollin' some film.
Create a reel with your best stuff on it then chop it down to less than 3 minutes long.
Call all the regional production houses and take any gig offered, even the unpaid internship.
Learn more at this gig than you did in school.
Start advertising locally (very locally) for event coverage services and wedding videography.
Make a sperate reel for these services and pimp that demo on your web site. Sling your website all over town, especially in the wedding places/papers.

As for price for your services, you'll be doing yourself a favor to call around on your own, getting wedding package prices. You can do it easy enough online but you really need local prices to properly compete. Don't become known as the cheapest in town. Become known as the best in town.
Your best sales person will always be your last client... or should be.
above all, make sure you have fun. If ya aint doin that, you are temporary.
 
grinner said:
Start with not calling it filming unless you are rollin' some film.
Create a reel with your best stuff on it then chop it down to less than 3 minutes long.
Call all the regional production houses and take any gig offered, even the unpaid internship.
Learn more at this gig than you did in school.
Start advertising locally (very locally) for event coverage services and wedding videography.
Make a sperate reel for these services and pimp that demo on your web site. Sling your website all over town, especially in the wedding places/papers.

As for price for your services, you'll be doing yourself a favor to call around on your own, getting wedding package prices. You can do it easy enough online but you really need local prices to properly compete. Don't become known as the cheapest in town. Become known as the best in town.
Your best sales person will always be your last client... or should be.
above all, make sure you have fun. If ya aint doin that, you are temporary.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the input. I actually have a cousin in advertising that is moving down here. He wants to do the same thing. We plan on collaberating and getting things going together.
 
The reel is #1. Along with advertising, I have found The Little Red Book of Sales to offer bite size snacks of sales common sense. It might be worth checking out.
 
Having a reel is irrelevant for you at this point, particularly in such a small market as you are describing. Plus, there's no use having a reel unless you have someone to show it to and until you begin the process of defining who your potential customers are and actually who they are, a reel is useless.

Once you outwardly begin treating your business as a business and positioning it professionally as such with the basics of quality business cards, web site and integrating yourself into the local business community, few people will ask for a "reel".

If you're just getting started and don't have much for a reel, don't sweat it. Just tell them you've been too busy to put together a reel or don't yet have enough quality projects to build one; you'll be working hard and adding extra effort to their project to make it not just an excellent piece for them, but for you too.

But again, until you have done all the other work of marketing, a reel is a waste of time that can be spent on building the foundation of your business clientele.

The advantage you have is that in such a small market, there may be little competition if any, and it will be easy to spread your name and talents around. Finding out who your competition is and getting to know them is part of the process; they could very well be a great source of referrals when they're overbooked or the job is too small for them.

Here's an ongoing thread you might like to read:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=83958

Feel free to PM me any time or better yet post a question in the thread linked above and I'll try to help you.

Good luck!

Robert Starling, SOC
 
Thanks for the input guys.

I won't have much competition in the city. I can't even find a website or much of anything in the phonebook for production companies. While I am not trying to be cocky, I think my chances are pretty good at getting something started. I am pretty excited about this.
 
I think there are advantages and disadvantages to your situation. I think you should be playing up and thinking about the advantages, rather than focusing on the disadvantages. The disadvantages of course may be that if you want to make a short film, sort of move into narrative filmmaking, you will not find enough talent in that size city to make something great, in my opinion, unless your skills are so overwhelming that you can basically teach a crew how to perform, and make everyday people or very untrained actors be that good. Those are negatives. But on the work side, I see a lot of positives -- you can be the only show in town, and if you do great work, nobody will have any choice if they want video work done. You need to be skilled, versatile, and open-minded in that small of a market, though. In a market of 200,000 to 500,000 you can get away with just doing commercial work, or just doing corporate and commercial work for instance, screw wedding videos and birthday parties and crap like that. It's not real filmmaking, anyway. But in a small market you need to be able to be THE GUY for anything film related, so if someone wants a meeting filmed and edited, you're the guy. If they want a little Web ad, you're the guy. If they want a training video, you're the guy. You get the idea. That takes a lot of skill or at least the willingness to learn many new skills and work hard, but it also can be pretty lucrative I think.

Frankly in Los Angeles it's a great place to learn and build your skills, a questionable place to make money. Of course a lot of people think, well, that's ludicrous, all of the big films are made in L.A. and there are TONS of entertainment industry jobs! Well, uhh, yeah... but there are ten people for every one decent paying gig or job, at least. That means you really have to be great to make it here, and it can leave some amazingly good talent fighting over table scraps. I'm not trying to be cocky or mean, but I could move to most mid-sized to small markets in the U.S. and pretty much dominate any companies in the area. They make a lot of amateur work, no real clue how to make professional work. I think they have the talent, they just don't have anyone who really knows what they're doing at the top. I mean, I can tell you when I see local ads in most markets, they are all awful, except in Los Angeles, where they look like national TV campaigns. You can't even tell. A Southern California Lexus commercial looks freakin' sweet, same with any other local ad. At worst I'll say to myself, "Eh, that's GOOD, but I could do better." Even then that's largely my ego, they are good ads, you can't usually complain. But in some pretty good sized cities, even 1+ million people, you see some surprisingly shoddy work that I wouldn't even put on my reel, and it plays citywide.

My problem is while I certainly know how to make sure work turns out great, I don't know how to do it all myself, so I would have very limited success in a tiny market. I would need a mid-sized market, or a large small market at least (200,000+ maybe), to have enough talent there (like DPs, etc.) to work with. I can't light it all and shoot it myself, which if you can do, that's great. I cannot compete in price with one-man band type of operations. I'm a one-man company but every project I am going to hire a significant crew. For most projects, short of basic corporate work, I believe in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, with a fairly significant crew and specialized roles, because it guarantees quality if you know who to work with and have a strong vision. Now for some corporate work I just hire a DP and then I act as director and grip, I put together the jib, dolly, lights, whatever, and help the DP, basically I become his underling even though I'm paying him and got the project, because I'm the one who doesn't know how to operate the camera and light properly, so I may as well not have to hire an extra grip and just do that crap myself. I don't mind getting my hands dirty. ;)
 
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