So you’ve started a video production company and you’ve been in the business for some time now, you probably know there’s rarely any consistency with the amount of work you’re going to land throughout the year. There will be slow seasons. Such is a fact of the freelancing life.
To offset the financial impact brought on by slow months, many professionals set up a passive income stream for themselves which often involves a digital product. Some sell preset/LUT packs while some launch courses on online learning platforms. Last week, we covered the complete guide on How to Make Money as a Videographer. Today, we’re going on a bit of a deep dive on one area that seems to be overlooked by a lot of filmmakers — selling stock footage as a side hustle.
With many small businesses lacking the budget for full-fledged production teams, stock videos are quickly becoming the next best thing for smaller brands’ marketing efforts. This of course presents a huge opportunity for videographers and filmmakers to set up a viable, true passive income stream to tie in with their business.
How Much Can I Make Selling Stock Footage?
Let’s get to the million-dollar question right away: how much can you realistically expect to earn from stock footage?
This largely depends on how much volume you’re willing to put out across stock footage platforms, the quality of clips you’re producing, and how large of a cut do these platforms take from your work. To give you an idea of what you can potentially earn from selling stock clips, let’s have a look at Nicole Glass’ highly informative video about her humble beginnings selling stock footage on Pond5.
Nicole, who’s non-exclusive Pond5 account now offers a catalog of 1,222 clips, made $33 last April. It was the following month where she started ramping up the volume of clips she’s uploading on the platform, making $241. It continued to snowball up to $405 last June, then going as high as $607 in July. The following months of August and September slowed down a bit where Nicole earned $315 and $496 respectively.
It is worth noting that Nicole’s reported earnings only comes from a single platform. If you can set aside time to build your library across different stock footage sites (which will be discussed later), then it’s easy to see how much potential there is in selling stock footage.
What Types of Stock Footage Sell Best?
This is honestly almost impossible to answer. Sure, there are main staples such as “lifestyle” shots to aerials and landscapes. But even these categories are extremely broad and it won’t exactly be productive to just list down every single type of stock footage that have ever sold in this article. So perhaps the better question would be, “what can you shoot” and more importantly, “what would you enjoy shooting?”
If you’re into martial arts as a hobby, see if you can put together a nice story around your gym. Mean-looking people launching missiles on a sandbag would probably look epic on a small fitness brand’s social media content. Do you live near a national park? Try shooting enchanting montages of environmental eye candy. Maybe you’ve been producing stop motion videos for another project, can you sneak in a quick, 30-second funky and vibrant lay-flat scene on the set to sell later as stock video? If you need more inspiration, check out Shutterstock’s super helpful blog post discussing stock footage trends last year.
Nicole Glass, in her video above, shared an interesting insight about her stock footage sales. Some of her best-selling footage fell in two subject matters: one is about how the pandemic has transformed our normal way of life, and the other involved news clips of protests and political events.
This should hopefully demonstrate how it’s very rare to come across “topics” or categories that will be guaranteed to sell: you really do need to put in the leg work to explore and test stock footage opportunities that come your way.
How Do I Shoot Stock Videos?
Unlike a commissioned project for one of your clients, there will be some key standards that should be considered and policies that’ll slightly reign in your creative license when shooting stock videos. Checkout our article on videography tips, and here are a few more tips and general guidelines to help you get started.
Secure All the Coverage You Need
If you’ve shot a narrative project before, then you should feel pretty much at home with shooting stock videos, especially those that fall into the lifestyle category. Luke Nuemman of Luke Neumman films recommends approaching a stock footage shoot as any other narrative project: get your establishing (wide) shots, and then start coming in closer for the profile shots, close-ups, and the detail shots. Doing so ensures that you’ll get enough coverage a you won’t need to do costly re-shoots especially if you’re working with hired talents. Here’s an awesome interview he did with Indy Mogul that should serve as a good baseline for anyone who wants to jump in the stock video business.
Add Movement in your Shots
You’re selling clips that are less than a minute long — best to keep things interesting. Camera movement provides that dynamic feeling to a scene, whether it’s just a simple push-in/pull out gimbal shot or a quick parallax shot that effectively separates the background from the subject. Check out Aputure’s short and sweet tutorial on some of the most useful gimbal moves you can apply to your stock footage.
Go Easy on the Color Grading
Luke makes a great point about color grading stock footage. “Color grading styles, they don’t last forever. So the thing that’s hot now with color grading will look bad in five years… The rule of thumb with stock if you’re going to grade it; go basic.” The idea is that you’ll want to make your library of stock footage “futureproof.” It has to be useable two to three years down the road, and applying heavily stylized color grading (like the teal and orange fad) to your clips will probably do more harm than good for you in the long run.
Be More Intentional with your Frame Rate Settings
It’s easy to solely rely on most modern camera’s ability to shoot up to 120 FPS for that sweet, sweet slow-mo. If you’re not careful, slow motion b-roll can quickly become a creative crutch and hinder your growth as someone who’s just entering the stock footage business. Play around with your frame rates; take a second to consider if your shot will look just fine with the standard 24 FPS, or if it’ll benefit from an epic slow-motion treatment.
Deliver in 4K if you can
A lot of popular go-to filmmaker cameras today like the Sony A7Siii can shoot 4K internally, something that was unheard of in a prosumer body just a decade ago. If you are lucky enough to own such capable cameras, then it may be best that you shoot everything in 4K to keep your library more futureproof. That said, 1080p is still widely considered as the standard so if you can’t upgrade your current set up to a 4K-capable rig, you’re still fine!
Below is a very informative video from Adobe Creative Cloud, starring filmmaker and photographer Chris Hau, which touches on video resolutions, format and typical length you’d need for your stock footage.
Which Platform Should You Use for Selling your Stock Footage?
When you’re starting, it’s too easy to overthink things which often leads to analysis paralysis. So to keep things simple, I suggest looking into the biggest stock footage platforms first like Shutterstock, AdobeStock, and Pond5.
Shutterstock employs a tier system that goes from levels 1 to 6, with contributor commissions ranging from 15-40% as you progress through the ranks. You can find AdobeStock’s pricing structure as well as some neat incentives you can enjoy for being active in their platform here.
Now, Pond5 does something different from the first two platforms. It offers as much as a 60% commission for exclusive content from their contributors, while non-exclusive contributors get 40%. Check out this breakdown of the benefits you can get if you choose to upload content on Pond5, whether you’re planning to produce exclusive content or not.
Hopefully, we’ve covered enough in this article to help you get started selling clips and building a reliable passive income stream to compliment your filmmaking career. Like YouTube, getting into selling stock footage means you’re playing for the long game; you wouldn’t get much out of it otherwise. But if you can treat your media drives as a gold mine and spend the time to salvage sellable clips, actively shoot more stock footage, and nourish your catalog through the course of your career, then the stock footage industry is definitely a worthwhile side hustle for you to pursue.