You’ve got all the gear you need to get started. You know the difference between shot lists and call sheets. You’ve finally sprung for that Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. There’s a fresh Facebook page with your new company logo on it. You’ve been through our guide on “How to Start a Video Production Company from Zero” and “37 Videography Tips for Beginners, New Filmmakers and YouTubers.”
All that’s missing is a steady stream of clients to fill your calendar.
So how do you exactly go from being a passionate, hobbyist filmmaker to getting paid as a passionate professional filmmaker, especially post-pandemic where it just seems a little tougher to start a business among all this inflation (in the USA at least).
For a lot of people venturing into the videography business, it was never as simple as going from point A to point B, not even without a global pandemic disrupting many creative fields today. To help you get the ball rolling for your career, we’re exploring some of the best ways you can make money as a freelance videographer.
The Definitive Guide on How to Become a Videographer
First off, you’ll have to find your niche in videography.
Shooting brand deals on TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts is vastly different from shooting a Hollywood film.
So start with finding your niche and then expand, here are a few examples:
- Become a Wedding Videographer
- Real Estate Videography
- Corporate Videographer – Business Videos, Commercials, etc.
- Freelance Video Editor
- Selling Stock Footage
- Become a YouTuber, or build a YouTube presence for other brands
Other services you can add as a videographer that can make money are:
- Legal Videographer – The use of legal videography is growing at a rapid pace, though many positions are offered as jobs, there are some freelance positions available. Legal video isn’t exactly the exciting work you want – but it pays the bill and is certainly worth adding as a service for freelance videographers. (Note: related services include forensic videographer, court videographer, etc.)
- Camera Operator – Camera movement is an art in of itself, and there are plenty of opportunities as a freelance camera operator, though these opportunities aren’t quite as lucrative. I’d recommend it for building a portfolio / demo reel, or potentially breaking into film.
- Travel videographer – If you start building a large social media following, you could make some money as a travel videographer.
Become a Wedding Videographer
Wedding videography is the bread and butter for many in the videography and photography space. And for someone who’s looking to jumpstart their career as a freelance videographer, the wedding industry seems to be the most obvious area to first break into. You could do both photo/video, or just specialize in video (what I would recommend starting out).
So how do you get started as a wedding videographer? Here’s what everyone will tell you: shadow a pro. What that means is that you’ll offer your still unrefined set of skills to a working professional for a low rate (or even for free), assisting them in a couple of weddings or more. That way there’s zero risk of you messing up the couple’s most important day while you pick up invaluable work experience.
Second shooting weddings is also a great way to learn the craft while building your own wedding reel. This allows you to cover some of the primary videographer’s responsibilities during the ceremony, which should put your technical skills to the test. When you’ve finally got enough weddings under your belt assisting and second-shooting, then you can finally fly solo and start your own wedding videography business.
Here’s an excellent beginner’s guide to wedding videography/photography by Eric Floberg:
Wedding video is probably the most lucrative niche in videography. However, it should be noted that the pandemic has placed the wedding industry in some sort of limbo. If weddings aren’t postponed or cancelled altogether, it is only being realistic to expect that the ceremonies that will go through will not resemble the grandeur of pre-COVID weddings — they’re likely to be more intimate and few and far between, at least for now.
That said, there’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic for the new year especially with the vaccine projected to be coming through in 2021, which should hopefully ease us back to normalcy and of course, ramp up the demand for a lot traditional videography gigs aside from weddings.
Break into Real Estate Videography
With tighter health restrictions being imposed, the real estate industry is seeing a huge demand for virtual tours and real estate videos to showcase properties. This is definitely an opportunity a lot of freelance videographers should capitalize on.
We’ve recently published “How Do I Become a Real Estate Photographer?” and most of the principles discussed in the article applies here. Before you go around offering realtors your service, it’s best to build your real estate demo reel first and get comfortable with shooting real estate videos. From there, it’s only a matter of reaching out to agents in your area and scouting listings near you. Fortunately, both can be done responsibly and safely done online! Here are a few of our other articles that could help you out:
- The GEAR You Need for Real Estate Videography
- Real Estate Videography Pricing (and how to make money!)
Parker Walbeck offers 10 solid tips for shooting real estate videos that cover pricing, pre-production planning, and a lot of basic real estate video shooting tips. The real estate video industry is exploding, I’d highly recommend checking this out!
Shooting Corporate Video – Repeatable, Scalable and Lucrative!
If you’re an aspiring videographer and you want something lucrative, but less pressure then weddings, corporate video might be just what you’re looking for. Most companies need simple talking head videos with a little bit of b-roll. You can start a barebones video production company for under $2000 (even under $1000 if you really wanted to) and you can start making money as a freelance videographer. You could easily find a good video camera under $1000, and you could pick up a few good mics for a couple hundred bucks. And then all you’d need is a tripod and simple lighting to get started.
Become a YouTuber, or create video content and a build a YouTube presence for brands
It’s no secret now as many YouTubers have revealed exactly how much they make on YouTube (tl;dr – millions $$$) and many are trying to cash in on this trend. We’ve went in-depth on this subject on our guide on The Best Video Camera for YouTube, where we breakdown a bunch of different niches on YouTube, and the exact gear they use (many use affordable gear!). And the beauty of YouTube is you don’t need film school, or experience with a videographer job. You just get started. You learn by doing. And you don’t necessarily need to be a cinematographer or an expert in video, you just need to have basic camera operation and the technical skill to produce high quality video and audio (which coincidently, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube!).
Start Selling Stock Footage
Amidst lockdowns and cancelled projects left and right, there hasn’t been a better time to start selling stock footage. If you’ve already got awesome footage from projects gathering digital dust in your hard drive, then it might be time to start curating and selling stock clips for a nice profit.
As with all things business, the stock footage industry is a marathon and not a sprint. Building a library of profitable stock clips will require consistent effort and patience. It’s also not just as a simple matter of picking eight random shots from your hard drive, uploading them on one to two stock footage marketplaces and calling it a day.
For example, you’ll be wise to do your homework on where you’d be selling your clips — some platforms will pay the contributor 30% of every sale, some goes as high as 50%, while others will give you a nice cash incentive to keep your content exclusive to their marketplace.
Again, do your homework and familiarize yourself with the marketplace’s policies, technical requirements such as preferred resolution/format, color grading guidelines and so on. Some of the household names in the industry are Shutterstock, Pond5, Adobe Stock, Storyblocks and a whole lot more which again highlights the importance of doing your own research to see which platforms will be a right fit.
Here’s a great video from Indy Mogul with some great nuggets of wisdom for filmmakers wanting to venture in the stock footage game.
Work as a Freelance Video Editor
You’re probably used to wearing many hats as a one-man production team, especially in the early stages of your career — so why not offer video editing services to supplement your income?
What’s even better is you can make money chugging along in your NLE timeline, growing your clientele, and honing a very core part of your business at the comfort of your own home!
+1 if you could differentiate yourself and specialize in editing software other than Premier Pro and Final Cut Pro (eg. After Effects, Neat Video, Audio Editing Software, etc.).
Upwork is easily one of the biggest freelancing platforms out there right now, and therefore hosts a huge chunk of all the freelancing jobs available worldwide. It also offers great security and many layers of protection systems in place to ensure your gig goes smoothly as possible, on both the client and freelancer side.
Granted, getting in on Upwork may not always be easy considering the sheer amount freelancers entering the platform. But if you can clearly define your skillset and expertise as a freelance video editor and differentiate yourself from the competition, then building credibility in the platform and setting Upwork as a reliable stream should only be a matter of time.
You can also try your luck on Fiverr, another giant in the freelancing space, People Per Hour, or even Craigslist. The gig economy has spawned many freelance marketplace platforms for up-and-coming creatives and veterans alike!
Make Music Videos
Something that you may not know is that a lot of Hollywood directors started their careers shooting music videos. Some notable heavyweights who made the jump from music videos to feature films are Michael Bay who worked with Aerosmith, David Fincher who shot Madonna’s “Bad Girl” and Spike Jonze who worked with the Beastie Boys and R.E.M.
Now, we all can’t be Spike Jonze or David Fincher (as much as we want to) and have all the A-listers in the music industry in our client list. You can’t also expect to earn thousands of dollars for your first couple of projects right out of the gate. What you can do instead is to start local. Get in touch with up and coming artists in your area and politely ask if they need a music video for their stuff. A lot of times, indie bands do.
Working with new talent with often micro-budget productions is good practice. It trains you to be resourceful and get creative with your projects as a filmmaker because you can’t just throw enough money on a problem for it to go away, unlike bigger studios.
This is an area where most filmmakers won’t mind the constraints of a shoestring production budget. As the work is purely creative, it’ll surely make the most impact on their professional career by expanding their skill set and network of potential future clients.
Check out TheBuffNerds’ amazing video below discussing the nitty-gritty of starting a career out of shooting music videos.
An aspiring videographer shouldn’t hesitate, now’s the time to become a professional videographer. If you’re still hesitant, perhaps you should start out with a videography job, the average salary for videographer salary is $48,000+, not bad for a job that typically doesn’t require a degree. I’d start with dabbling in a few different freelance videography services and find what you love the best… if you love what you do, it won’t feel like work.