I Stopped Doing This and Doubled My Income
I learned a really important lesson from one of my mentors that completely changed my life and how I approached my filmmaking career. I wanted to share it with you and hopefully, it will have a similar impact.
When I was first starting out, I would say to everything. If I was available, I would do the job. It didn’t matter if it was a wedding shoot, short film, or high school hockey game. I would go shoot it.
I would even say yes if they wanted me as a grip to help with lighting or as a production assistant. For a couple of years, you didn’t hear no out of my mouth.
I also didn’t much care how much they were paying.
Then, I got a call from one of my mentors that was a pretty successful DP at the time.
He call and said “hey I gotta bone to pick with you”
I didn’t even really know that expression but it didn’t sound good.
He said, " I heard you just did a shoot for $300 bucks. Now I wasn’t saying no to anything and that’s what they said they had.
So I said yea that was the rate they had.
Then he said something I’d never forget. “If we are taking on any project, at any rate, it will destroy our industry.”
Looking back now, it has moved in that direction every single year.
So I asked him, well what should I do. He said, “say no”. Again, that was so foreign to me. I only said no if I was booked on something else. I never asked what the job was or what the rate was.
He said it’s wonderful to do that for a couple of years and see what you like and what you don’t like. But after that, you gotta know what direction you want to go and what the minimum rate should be for your skillset.
I asked him what he thought I would charge. He said the minimum shoot be $500 as a shooter. And remember, this is over 10 years ago.
And he said “stop taking other gigs where you are not shooting”
I remember thinking well I can’t do that. I’ll lose my current clients and make way less money. But he was so much more successful than me and I wasn’t doing all that well anyway.
So I figured I should give it a shot.
And for the next few months, I started saying no a lot more than I said yes. And I worked less. But I knew I didn’t want to grip, I didn’t want to PA and I wanted to be a DP. So if the job didn’t put me behind a camera, I didn’t take it.
And if it didn’t pay at least a $ 500-day rate, I didn’t take it either. I started to realize what my skills were worth.
This set me up to make a normal living without working a crazy number of days and it set me up to be a much better DP. And later, I think because of that transition, I was able to create my own successful video production company.
So the lesson I learned was to say yes to everything for a little while, gain skills, see what you like and what you don’t like, and then start saying no and go down a path that you design for yourself.
Learn the exact blueprint I used to go from a struggling videographer, to running a profitable video production business, in this one-hour free training.
https://www.filmmakingmentor.com/Vide...
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