C300: C300 Mark II/C100 Cinematography Reel

[Eric Coughlin]

Eric.

On the email thing personally I am a little confused by the entity of TwoSense films. Are you a solo op with an amera available to hire by production companies or are you a production company (with the backroom to script, contract, sign off, run liability and much more) ?

It would seem the equipped solo operator would be best with mynameDOTcom and nameATmynameDOTcom

especially when you have a google friendly name. unlike John Smith or suchlike.

I'm both a freelance solo operator with gear (who is also capable of providing crew) and a production company. Most or all of my production company's work is Catholic media, which is good in that it doesn't conflict business wise with my freelance client base which is mostly not Catholic media. It explains this in the "About Me" bio page on my site.

I try to be a jack of all trades. Freelancer, production company owner, types of work I do is vast, etc. Sure, I could make 20 different reels with a few different website to try to separate each thing I offer, but that sounds like a huge pain and too much work for not enough ROI, and when advertising my services, which website would I direct the advertisements to, etc. Thus far, I've found it best to consolidate things into as few reels as needed and into one website. I did create a separate website for my Steadicam services, but I don't think I've gotten a single job from it since it went up almost a year ago so I'm not planning to renew that website.

I see plenty of freelancers with company names instead of using their own name.

 

[Eric Coughlin]

I haven't used GoDaddy's email, though I'd expect GoDaddy email to be reliable: https://www.godaddy.com/help/set-up-email-addresses-7600 . You've already paid for the domain service, if it makes sense for you, you have the option to get a more marketing friendly email, and can even spin up a few addresses if you ever need them: booking@, sales@, support@, <somespecialevent>@ etc. To be honest I have less trust for the gmail side of the equation- sometimes emails (already read) disappear, won't show up in searches, then later reappear. The only reason I route through gmail is "free" SPAM filtering. Of course it's not free, Google is reading all our emails and tailoring ads based on the intel gathered, selling analytics etc.

If online marketing presence doesn't matter, then these videos don't matter either. If an online presence does matter for marketing, analytics are very helpful in guiding you regarding optimizations to improve content for sales. Minimally you can do before/after and/or live A/B testing to make simple improvements based on analytics results.

I just think it'd be difficult to pinpoint how successful a reel is. You could try one reel for a month, get a lot of work, try a different reel the next month, get less work, and draw false conclusions on that data, when perhaps really the decline in work was just a seasonal thing that would have happened regardless of the reel changes.

More marketing friendly as in SEO friendly, or just in terms of repertoire with clients? As I said, I don't think my clients are going to care much about whether or not my e-mail address comes from @TwoSenseFilms.com or @gmail.com. In terms of SEO, my website doesn't really show up in SEO, and would probably take a lot of work to get it showing up. So, since my current marketing does not rely on SEO for my website, making minor improvements to SEO would be negligible help to SEO. If I ever wanted to succeed with SEO, it'd take a lot of work, knowhow, and/or money.

How's work in Atlanta? I visited this studio a few years ago, they had a nice production studio and a lot of ARRI cameras & high-end lenses: https://www.sharaf.net/atlanta-gallery/

Eh, since I officially moved here about two and a half weeks ago I don't know how good the Atlanta market is yet. I've done a few jobs here so far. Most of my work lately involves traveling to cities within a six to eight hour drive of where I live; in January I drove about 6000 miles for work. Atlanta is nice in that it's closer to several large cities than Tampa was. Doing a feature in South Carolina for the next 10 days starting on Thursday. May have a shoot in Atlanta tomorrow, but not confirmed yet.

As I said, while I've got all this non-local work going, I just need to supplement it with finding local work, which will involve reaching out to a bunch production companies and agencies in the area. Hence updating my reels.

The cheap housing market in Atlanta is awesome, though. I've got a nice large house here compared to my not-so-nice apartment in Tampa, for close to the same price.


Kind of like Morgan had asked me, I'm a bit confused by what Sharaf is. Is it an equipment reseller (I see they sell gear), a rental house, a production company (they have a client list), all of the above? They sure do have a lot of gear.

 

[morgan_moore]

I'm both a freelance solo operator with gear (who is also capable of providing crew) and a production company. .

Its all good

I guess Im partly chatting out loud because Im kind of the same muddled boat.. but I have observed that the bigger hitters are very clear.. you seem to be transitioning from jobbing C100 chap to Amera big hitter.. and that is the journey Im commenting on... and especially when meeting a new crowd in a new area it might be worth having a little think session.