Need critiquing on my business/career path...

Blade Borge

Blade Borge

Well-known member
Atlanta-

Trying to make it as a videographer/wedding camera op/corporate videographer/anything editing shooting/ video...so far my only options have been low-balling sketchy craigslist and infrequent mandy.com. Can't find work...

I'm a film grad, just bought two HD cameras, don't really have enough money to buy a website, though I do have online demo reel stuff.

My wedding videography problem- I've only shot a few weddings, so I've got something nice to show, but it seems like there's alot of seasoned wedding videographers who've already cornered the market. The offers I do get or like 1-2 a month, low balling stuff.

My corporate videography dilemma - I've never really done it before, I don't really know how to get into it (I guess word of mouth right?)

I feel like I'm thinking out loud, answering my own question, if I want to make it I gotta work for free right? Get the word of mouth going about me right? I guess I'm demotivated/weary of doing alot of work for free for someone that might not lead somewhere, I just gotta take risks and suck it up, right?
 
Did you take business classes when you were getting your degree? Those are much more important than anything else.

I don't know anything about your market. You have to sell yourself, but how depends on where you are and the image you're going for. Here are some facts for videography: as you noted, there are established professionals. There are also plenty of people who just got some cameras willing to do it for less or free. The advent of inexpensive equipment has opened up the lower end to pretty much everyone. Today's market is crowded and dwindling... a lot of people just aren't looking for professional video work. I've photographed many weddings, and never or rarely see video there. It just isn't considered a necessity. So it's not easy to offer that particular service.

You have to put yourself out there. Do you have business cards? How often do they leave your wallet? Does anyone you know NOT know that you're trying to sell these services? They need to.

Most every job I've secured has been through friends, word of mouth, things like that. Networking, at any level, is the most important thing you can do. The second most important thing you can do is not quite your day job, at least not for a while.
 
Website (costs almost nothing), business cards, DVD and online demo. Join the local Chamber of Commerce or regularly crash their business functions and network. They key is regularly so that your face becomes known. Have a goal to hand out and collect, say, 20 cards at each function. Call each person a couple days later for a (very) brief friendly chat and ask them if they have anything coming up you can help them with.

I wouldn't bother low-balling. I only started getting large amounts of work after I raised my prices above my competitors (and did good work of course).

For weddings (which I don't do), I would align myself with a number of wedding planners and give them a cut.

Once you get a few good clients who have learned that you're dependable and do good work, they'll always use you. I only have a few clients now, but they regularly use me year after year and I have to turn-away work.
 
A Website doesn't cost almost nothing. A crappy Website costs almost nothing. ;)

You can spend tens of thousands on a good Website. Mine would have cost $10,000 easy, but I was fortunate enough to know people who have the skills to make that top-tier Website but not the portfolio to get paid properly for it, so I did it for just above $3,000.
 
bimdas said:
i'd like to see what a $10000 personal website looks like. can you post a link?
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Personal Website? Nobody said it was a personal Website. It's a corporate Website. I am the company, so of course it has all of my pro work on it, but it's a business site. And there's not much point in showing you the site right now, I mean I'd be happy to have you check it out, but any criticisms aren't going to be too useful because it's version 1.0 of a site that is simply not finished yet. Even if it were finished, you couldn't see the back-end without me allowing you to login, which I would never do, so I'd have to post screen captures of basically what that looks like. But it's not done yet so I couldn't even do that! haha.

For one, our music video CSS layout is not finished. The layout for my short film is done but the CSS is not integrated very well, it's a hack-job done for temporary purposes because the Indian design firm did so bad that we have to hire a new CSS guy to fix it! That's not a good situation.

The primary site layout, the corporate layout in other words, is too plain. We want to extend the blue to run down the sides of the pages fully, also give some frames / dimensionality to the project thumbnails on section pages, for instance, and a few other details because every time I've talked about it with my head guy I've said, "It's just TOO plain, it's functional and it's ok for the 1.0 launch but it's just not visually dynamic enough for what I wanted." The issue was trying to make it clean and professional, while at the same time still visually interesting. I don't feel that was accomplished, but we're working on it and it's a matter of getting the new CSS guy because my head programmer doesn't do CSS, he can do some, and can fix things, but he can't do a great job on it yet.

There are tons of other issues, no picture galleries on the site yet, that will come later. The request a quote link just pulls up an e-mail address. It should and will pull up a form.

Those are some of the things that come to mind. Frankly a lot of what you are paying for when you have a site like that is the back-end integration, the automatic laurel generator for instance, the modularity of the site so that new projects can have certain elements (text fields, picture galleries, videos) and not others. The way the site is put together so that you could change CSS templates easily and maintain the functionality of the Website.

Right now, it's a static Website. You could have a site like this designed probably for $1,000 to $1,500 by professionals. I've had several like this done previously for about that price range, although I wasn't happy with one of them because the coding was still not good, there were issues. Then I had this friend redesign a static site in the past (why I trusted him to do this project), a joke site I ran that made about $3,000/month back in the day, and he made a completely awesome back-end where instead of re-coding the front page constantly and the archive pages with the new jokes and pictures, and inputting new banner ad code manually, new popups manually, etc., I just input those into a field in the back-end and it changed everywhere. The pictures could be put into a folder and the site could either manually update with as many photos as you wanted, or you could set it to auto-update at whatever time of the day, every day, that you wanted it to. So I could go on vacation for a week and it would, every day, post two new pictures and one new joke, and I'd continue to make money without having to do any work for that week. It was fantastic. And that's basically what I am going for on this site, complete ease of use and updating.

The issue is that as a site user, you're unlikely to see or understand what takes so much time and so many people to create a great Website. It's a lot more than how it looks, that's simply what you pay a graphical designer, frankly, and basic function is not something too hard to do. It's planning for the future and making the site easy to update that is 90% of the time and energy on a project.

But if you'd like, I mean my site is available publicly, so you are free to check it out here: http://www.jlbmedia.com

I have my short film link redirect to that site as well, www.devilsmatchmaker.com. So in the future I'll do that with other projects that are worthy of it as well.
 
Anyways, thanks for tidbits guys, I didn't take any business classes in college, now I'm paying the price, I have business cards that are slowly being dispersed. Yes, website is the next thing my paycheck is going to, please feel free to offer more suggestions everybody, thanks again!
 
My sites costs nothing but my time because I did them myself (but I know how, and am mighty dangerous with Photoshop).

You can get a $5/month account at almost anywhere (I use TotalChoiceHosting) that has a number of built-in CMS system (I use Drupal or Typo3 on my sites), which have a number of ready-built templates (easily configurable through CSS) waiting for your content. It will take you about a week to get a professional-looking site up if you spend a couple hours a day at it.

If you have a graphic-designer friend who can help you out, then great. If not, just don't go overboard and try to keep things simple.

People who visit your site don't care if it's flashy or not, as long as it not so cheesy that it sets off warning bells. They're there because it came up in a Google search and they're looking for your phone number, or you sent them there to download a demo.
 
Yeah I wish I had all of those skills but frankly nobody really does. I think a lot of people think they do. But of the 100 or so CSS people we reviewed, only 4-5 had any real CSS skills. The rest were average to terrible at coding. Of the 100 or so graphical designers we saw, actually probably 125 or so, I found only a handful I thought were any good, maybe 3 or 4. The rest were not talented, and wanted $75/hr. My editor is far more talented than most of them, and in retrospect since he comes from a background in graphic design I should have just hired him, I was thinking that I could find someone really top notch and professional but in reality I was looking for something I basically already had. Note to self for next time. So I had him do my brochures, business cards, banner, etc.

It's hard / impossible to find one person who is a great graphic designer, a great programmer, great at HTML, CSS, etc. I mean nobody has all of those skills, which is why teams of people put together the best Websites. Although I wish I had some of those skills, I really don't have the time to mess with it because it's hard enough figuring out everything in filmmaking!! haha.
 
JonathanLB said:
Yeah I wish I had all of those skills but frankly nobody really does. I think a lot of people think they do. But of the 100 or so CSS people we reviewed, only 4-5 had any real CSS skills. The rest were average to terrible at coding. Of the 100 or so graphical designers we saw, actually probably 125 or so, I found only a handful I thought were any good, maybe 3 or 4. The rest were not talented, and wanted $75/hr. My editor is far more talented than most of them, and in retrospect since he comes from a background in graphic design I should have just hired him, I was thinking that I could find someone really top notch and professional but in reality I was looking for something I basically already had. Note to self for next time. So I had him do my brochures, business cards, banner, etc.

It's hard / impossible to find one person who is a great graphic designer, a great programmer, great at HTML, CSS, etc. I mean nobody has all of those skills, which is why teams of people put together the best Websites. Although I wish I had some of those skills, I really don't have the time to mess with it because it's hard enough figuring out everything in filmmaking!! haha.
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Hrmm... We are trying to help you, not argue the point of how much a website would, should or did cost back in the day...

I build very nice (more simple) websites like http://www.naplesparadiseclassic.com/ for pennies now a days... Web design is just like video per say, its over saturated and people will do it for free to get the portfolio piece.. I charge $1000-$3500 depending on, amount of content, ecommerce, SEO, and features like video, directories, forums, contact forms etc.

Worst comes to worst get one of these "over night website" software, and do something with your graphic designer.

Then SEO it. Within 2 weeks - I am happy to get my site on the 1st page of google!!!


BTW: I would be able to design, host, program, css varify, seo & sem any website for under $10,000. PM me if you would like a quote.
 
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Haha, I'm not sure why you're addressing that to me, I'm just telling you that I have many professionals in the business, my best friend as well, and if you're the one in a million who can do it all great, good for you. But I doubt it. I've yet to see one person who can do more than 2 things well. You aren't going to find a great graphic designer who can also program a database-driven site in PHP or Cake PHP or something, and also knows perfect CSS, and can manage command-line functions to make server changes, etc. My friend is about as close as you get to all of those skills -- he has been home schooled since after 8th grade, and had nothing better to do than focus all his time on being a complete nerd ;)

Obviously and evidently many people think they are good at these things. They are not. I'm not trying to be mean or step on toes, but the fact is most people absolutely suck at what they're trying to do. It's just like people say, "Well there are tons of filmmakers, I mean they are a dime a dozen. Oh there are tons of editors, they're a dime a dozen." Yeah, there are. But how many are GOOD? Not very many. I can show you tons of editors who can do basic editing on Final Cut. Mine knows Final Cut, Premiere, the full suite of programs for each one, understands how to do great graphic design work on top of that so he can make me DVD covers, posters for my projects, etc. He can do basic motion graphics work, not that much but enough, and he understands how all of these programs fit together. It took 11 programs to create my short film. A simple editor doesn't know that many programs and isn't a very good editor. Most don't have the storytelling skills either. And most filmmakers completely suck, which is evidenced by film festivals. You see a festival take 20% of the entries and you go there and watch the entries, half of those are still horrible. Most people are amateurs and have no understanding of quality. So sure, I could find tons of people to make me a Website for not much money. There are, however, very few who are true professionals.

I personally reviewed the graphic design portfolios of these 125 or so entrants we got. I literally could have done just the same stuff myself as 50 of those people and I suck at Photoshop, but I also have taste and am a perfectionist -- and can read -- so I'd have the understanding to research as necessary. There were only 3-4 of those people who did work that was truly exceptional. They were artists. They had style. That's true of virtually anything.

So sure, if you have low standards, and "good enough" is ok with you, fine. But I have very high standards and most people simply do not reach those standards. My programming friend is the same. He kept finding people who claimed to be experts in CSS -- 9 out of 10 of them had coding that was unacceptable for his standards. Sure, a few were "ok" or serviceable but we want excellent, perfect code. Not a rat's nest mess that gets the job done for a while until it ever needs changing.

Some people are willing to pay for quality. A lot of people are not. I am willing to pay. I understand if I want the best, I have to pay more money to get it. Now on an indie film shoot I'm fine with just an ok grip, I don't care, we're probably only using very basic lights anyway, anyone could grip that, including myself. It's not a big deal. But I will pay to have a great DP because I know I will get a difference in quality. That's the understanding at the top that makes projects turn out right, knowing where you can cut costs and where you cannot. I take my company seriously. I'm not just some guy with a reel. I am running a corporation. So spending $3,000 or $4,000 on a Website is no big deal if it's a great site. That's part of marketing and advertising and that money will come back to you. I think it's just like my producing teacher said -- too many people in film are just artists, no business sense at all.

And a great Website takes months to develop. I've been in online business since 2001, running a variety of sites from celebrity sites to humor sites to movie review sites and now a film production company site, also hobby sites besides that and several book Websites. It takes time to make a truly great site. You can get a pretty solid one slapped together in a few weeks. But if you want full database management and CSS integration with a bunch of great designs, it will take MANY months. It's like building a house. You are working with a team of people, if you want true experts, and you have to coordinate between them, and then there are always tweaks and modifications to the plans. It's a lot of work even just sitting down and figuring out what you want on the site and how it should be arranged. I've had at least 15 to 20 hours worth of discussions about just the layout of my site and functionality of the back-end, etc.
 
Okay it's time for Marketing 101. It's all marketing right? You have a service and you need to find people that want that service. So let's look at your target markets. People getting married. Think of every possible part of a wedding...dresses, tuxes, caterers, flowers, churches/country clubs/halls/etc., hair, shoes, wedding licence, still photos, etc. How many florists, hair salons, tux rental shops, caterers, etc. have you visited and offered them a cut if they refer you? They become your sales force. They get 15% or whatever you think is reasonable. So you up your price to cover their percentage. You have the opportunity to have a huge sales force working for you if you hit the streets and market. You don't market based on your product...you market based on the outcome...what they get out of it. When you talk to your potential clients you tell them the lasting memories they will get from your services. You sell them on the benefit of your service.

So get a website! Even if you have to use Yahoo sitebuilder or some other free template.
1. Domain name - $5-10
2. Free software
3. Yahoo hosting $10 per month

You are in business.

Make up some flyers and hit the streets. Look at your competition and model what they are doing...excpet do it better. Your job is to find a job. In 8 hours you can hit a ton of salons, florists, etc. Treat it as a game...see how many places you can market to. Once the snowball gets rolling look out!

Go forth and conquer!
 
Its crazy that some of you guys think a thousand dollar website will make or break a career. All you need in a website is your reel/rates/resume and basic info. I did mine for about 50 per year.
 
Blade Borge said:
Atlanta-

Trying to make it as a videographer/wedding camera op/corporate videographer/anything editing shooting/ video...so far my only options have been low-balling sketchy craigslist and infrequent mandy.com. Can't find work...

I'm a film grad, just bought two HD cameras, don't really have enough money to buy a website, though I do have online demo reel stuff.

My wedding videography problem- I've only shot a few weddings, so I've got something nice to show, but it seems like there's alot of seasoned wedding videographers who've already cornered the market. The offers I do get or like 1-2 a month, low balling stuff.

My corporate videography dilemma - I've never really done it before, I don't really know how to get into it (I guess word of mouth right?)

I feel like I'm thinking out loud, answering my own question, if I want to make it I gotta work for free right? Get the word of mouth going about me right? I guess I'm demotivated/weary of doing alot of work for free for someone that might not lead somewhere, I just gotta take risks and suck it up, right?
Click to expand...

Hi Blade,

The Dvxuser forum if filled with professional level folks and a fair number in your line of work. However, if you really want to rub elbows with your contemporaries (or would-be colleagues), I suggest you also hang out in their forums. VideoUniversity has a very active forum with hundreds of videographers that regularly post on topics specific to their business; it will cost you $25/year but it's worth every penny for anyone serious about their business. Another good site with regular audiocast/podcasts is TheDVShow. Speaking of which, WebVidTalk probably has over 100 audiocast/podcasts with successful videographers.

If you need a videographer coach, you may wish to consider MindYourVideoBusiness.

And of course, you should also develop friendships with your local Atlanta Videographer Association.

Having high-tech toys are fun but have little to do with being a successful businessman. If you're spending less than 20 percent of your total expense budget on Marketing and Advertising as a new business entrepreneur, you're probably missing the mark. No, that doesn't mean you need to spend thousands of dollars on a website (many pro videographers get nice flash-based sites for under $1000). But for sure, you absolutely need a website/blog as part of your overall campaign. If nothing else, see what the smart money is doing in your area (check out the links on your Atlanta PVA) - if it works for them, it can work for you.

Good luck, Michael
 
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