I want to have an honest conversation about making money as a filmmaker that no one is talking about. In the first seven years of my career, when I constantly struggle and couldn’t make a decent living creating videos, I really wish I had someone that would have had this conversation with me and told me what I needed to hear.
In the last few months, I’ve talked to a lot of filmmakers and I’ve responded to a lot of comments on KZfaq there is a common theme or a false belief that we need to overcome. My goal is to help filmmakers make more money, but I can’t do that without breaking this false belief. This is the same thing I’ve heard for 15 years of doing this and it’s going to be a common belief in 15 years too.
I created several videos showing a pricing breakdown of a $5000 video project. In some of those comments and some one-on-one conversations, a few people mentioned that they are doing videos for 200, 300, or 500 dollars and 5000 doesn’t make sense.
They believe that their clients won’t ever spend 5k for a video.
And to be clear, through my company, we don’t do 5000 videos. That’s where we started. Our average project hasn’t been under 10k for a long time.
But let me break this down and explain where the disconnect is and why a 5k video is within the reach of most people. And I understand that in some countries, creating local videos is going to have a different entry point. But the false belief behind this is the same.
Let’s just take the 200 examples. Let’s say you are the most hard-working person out there and somehow manage to do 100 video projects in one year. That’s planning, producing, shooting, and editing everything by yourself. If you do this for 200 dollars, you are making 20k per year. Take out taxes, the equipment you need to buy to do the job, gas, insurance, and everything else that is required to make a video, you are working for free at best.
At 500 per video, you may be able to reach a minimum wage living.
Your other option is just to freelance as a shooter and not do the entire video, but now you need more than 100 shots a year to make a decent living. You’ll probably need closer to 200 which is really hard to get.
I think we can agree that this doesn’t make much sense to pursue.
The option that I’ve been teaching and what broke my 7-year steak of not figuring things out is charging what a production company would charge for a video and promoting yourself as a company instead of the one-man band that will do it all.
In doing so, you will spend some time learning basic marketing and advertising.
This is another false belief. Because more filmmakers are creative people, they refuse to get into the business side with marketing at the center.
So the 2-3% that actually do tend to get all the higher paying clients, and the rest are left fighting for jobs under 1000 dollars.
And regarding the comment about my clients won’t pay more than 500, that is 100% accurate. Your current clients will not. You need to find the right clients that will.
How? Learn enough about marketing, so you can let the people that you want as clients know you exist.
I remember the exact moment when I was able to suddenly go from 500 videos to 5000 videos. I didn’t convince my existing clients to pay me 10x more.
I learned sales and marketing and got new clients that paid 10x more. And I was able to create videos for them at an entirely different level for that price.
Then I kept leveling up over time. There are 30-second videos getting made for 100 dollars all the way to 500,000 dollars. If you are stuck in the 500 video world, you have to understand that there are bigger fish in the sea.
Be one of the few filmmakers out there willing to learn the business side of filmmaking and you will break your false belief and discover a new career path.
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.
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