Client Work

This is pro level—doing full projects for clients, including the entire process of developing clients, writing proposals, giving pitches, shooting footage, editing it, sound design, and delivering a rough cut and a final cut on a variety of projects. Such projects might include commercials, weddings, promotionals (nonprofits, book promos, apps etc.), business profiles, documentaries, and multimedia journalism.

The next chapter will examine bidding, client development, and proposals, but the idea of client work is really what running a video production house is about. If you’re a one-person crew, it’s possible to work on smaller projects, but as projects become more complex, you may want a crew—and once you hire one, you’ll need to increase the budget to cover the cost—so it should impact your bottom line.

As mentioned above, Stillmotion began as a two-person company that shot weddings with stills and video (one person on each). The video was shot in a cinematic style, and as it evolved it focused more on characters and story. Now, Amina Moreau says, they do mostly commercial work, including promotional films. They have not given up on doing weddings, however, although they now only do a couple a year. Furthermore, they’re applying the storytelling concept to the promotion of businesses through film, which is one of their goals—“to really tell stories of people doing some sort of good,” Amina adds. “Our preference is to work with companies whether they’re for-profit or nonprofit that are somehow making the world better. That’s where our heart really lies.” This is what they look for in clients, she explains. They still do weddings “because they have a certain something—an emotional quality. And the kinds of couples that we now attract are people that end up becoming life-long friends a lot of the time, so we truly do love weddings.” Although you will likely end up doing projects which you may not fully love in order to pay the bills, this sense of love and respect for the client is all important to the Stillmotion team.

However, as Patrick notes, when they do the larger promotional projects and commercials, it’s something that does need a bigger team than for weddings. “You need producers, you need directors, you need a director of photography (DP). In a wedding you can get away with two people.” And the person on camera, the DP in this case, is also “the director and is also the gaffer and is also the production assistant”—which, of course, impacts the bottom line.

Patrick explains: “If we were doing weddings for x amount, then when we shoot a commercial-type project, it become x times five.” The budget changes and how you approach the work changes.

To engage in a cinematic storytelling style—and to make your work competitive —then conceiving of a project from the outset differently than a conventional one, requires you to think like a cinematic storyteller. When they were conceiving the book promotional, My Utopia, Patrick describes the initial research (after reading Stephanie Henry’s autobiographical If Only I Could Sleep: A Survivor’s Memoir, Emerald, 2014). The typical approach of such a book promo would be to get contacts from Stephanie Henry for the Stillmotion team to interview, and deciding who they might interview to get the story. “It would be a traditional interview,” Patrick says, “a whole bunch of people talking about who Stephanie is and why she’s awesome and how good her book is, show some b-roll of her and her family and put it together.” But they decided not to go the traditional route. When Patrick got to the section of the book that included a high-school essay that Henry had read to her class in 1981, he changed the direction of the project, making the story cinematic at the same time.

“That essay is what would become your trailer,” Patrick told Stephanie. “We’re not interviewing people, we’re not doing anything else, that’s too safe, that’s too easy. What we need to do is to rebuild that day she read her essay in 1981,” he explains. In cinematic storytelling, pushing the boundaries becomes important. This project is detailed in Chapter 8.

Freelancing

In many ways this is the simplest way to run your business. Freelance your skills to other production companies, whether it’s in editing, shooting, sound recording, or even sound design or audio mixing. They get the clients and they hire you as part of a team. Make sure your skills are strong and that your work is professional in every way. You can freelance solo projects, like multimedia journalism, or be a subcontractor on a crew-based project for another production house. With this approach, you don’t need to worry about getting clients, since you’re being hired to do a particular job for another company (including doing freelance video for a newspaper).

Eléonore (Léo) Hamelin started out as a television reporter in France. Eventually she grew tired of the television news gig and she applied and got accepted to graduate school in journalism at Columbia University in New York. Since then she’s done some teaching, as well as working as a freelancer, shooting documentary-style short work. As a freelancer, she thought she could just pick and choose her stories. “You’re like, ‘I’m freelancing I’m going to do what I want,’” she told me, “but in reality if no one see your stories you’re losing your time.” She warns that you should not commit to a potential story until you know you have a place that it can be picked up and screened. She had a difficult time with that, but, she adds, “As much as you have a bright idea if no one wants to publish it it’s not really the way to go, because a) you are doing work for your own hard drive and it’s going to stay there, and b) you’re also not getting any money.” Don’t take on a project unless you know you’re going to get paid (unless you’re doing it for your portfolio).

“It takes self-discipline to make a good pitch,” Léo says. You have to make the time to dig into a story and “figure out a main character, get access, and discover why the story is exciting. After that you need to wait and see if anyone’s interested in it. And then go ahead with the story.” But she feels it’s worth it, because it fires her passions:

Léo feels that as a one-woman operation, she has full creative control over her material—especially when editing. By editing your own work, she realized, “you are accountable to yourself to get all of the shots. And it makes you a much better shooter in the end because you come back and you’re like, ‘I can’t build a scene with this!’ You really just spent the whole afternoon shooting this one thing that was funny and you didn’t capture anything else that was going on. It makes you realize that you need a huge variety of shots, but you also need to keep continuity and you need to get good sound.”

Working as a crew member is different, since you’re ultimately responsible for doing a great job in your one role, whether as a shooter, sound recordist, or editor. In either case, the ability to be a part of a crew or do solo work is something you may need to juggle as you take on different types of freelance work.

Licensing Footage

There are many places where you can license footage. For stills photographers, Getty is one of the large ones, but unless they receive a large volume of licensing requests for your images, this is certainly not a viable income stream—especially as a sole means of support. Approach licensing as something extra, and if it eventually pays well through large volumes, then it’ll pay off. Otherwise, make sure your primary strategy is getting clients and setting up freelance gigs. Film Supply (http://filmsupply.com/) provides stock footage that includes cohesive multiclip scenes and prices that revolve around the specific project a client may need. You can apply to have your portfolio reviewed as a potential contributor at: http://filmsupply.com/#modal.

Story & Heart is another example of a site where filmmakers and talented shooters can upload story-driven and authentic footage for worldwide licensing. It’s a multifaceted business extension of Stillmotion. In fact, Patrick Moreau explains, it’ll become bigger than Stillmotion. It includes an education arm called the Academy of Storytellers as well as a community of filmmakers. Patrick Moreau explains how it’s a natural evolution and an important next step for Stillmotion: “It is taking what is best about what we have created over the past number of years with Stillmotion” and turning it into a business model: “Connecting with filmmakers, sharing ideas, collaborating, and then trying to help people be better at what they do. It’s evolving that model exponentially. Other people teach through the Academy and collaborate on projects through the community.” It goes back to their fundamental mission: Story first and being “connected to what you do through collaboration to a much greater degree.” You have to own the rights to the footage and, if you’re using client work, you need to put that into the contract.

“I’m going to work really hard shooting a project, so I don’t know if I want to give up my rights to all of it,” Patrick says. “For example,” he adds, “there’s a project that I just submitted a creative estimate for and they came back and said, ’You know we love you guys, we love the philosophy, and we think we are a really good fit, but it’s above our budget.’” When that happens, Patrick explains, then they’ll work with the client. They can cut things out of the budget in order to lower it. “We can cut here, that’s what it’s going to result in, or we can give you an overall X percent discount if you let us retain the copyright, and they went for it . . . Because they wanted us enough and they also wanted the price brought down enough that they were willing to forego ownership of the footage,” Patrick explains. “They get a great film out of it, and they get no compromises in the quality of their work. Since in this case we don’t own the footage we will relicense footage to earn additional money.” But that doesn’t mean they want to use the footage carte blanche. “We won’t necessarily show their product in the footage or create anything like it,” Patrick says. “We’re not going to relicense interviews, but we will use b-roll from the city that we’re shooting in. We’re starting to encourage other filmmakers in the city to think about ways to earn money from licensing footage.”

Why is that important? It allows the client to get their film on a lower budget, Patrick explains: “You can hopefully make the money back you lost with the lower budget, while at the same time creating new relationships from the process in licensing your footage.”

Why did they decide to go this direction? To help filmmakers. “As a filmmaker 95 percent of what I shoot sits on a hard drive and nobody ever sees it and that is stuff that I have poured my heart and soul into. I have no revenue coming back in.” Moreau feels that’s not a viable option, nor is it sustainable. “It’s hard to have something this physically demanding as filmmaking, this many hours, and after 30 years of my life I’m going to put my camera down, and then what? How do I do that? I better hope that I’ve saved enough money for retirement!” He feels that Story & Heart will allow people like him (as well as many other filmmakers) to “create a way that all of this stuff that I’ve cared and lovingly poured over can not only create revenue for me but can also help other storytellers.” Despite the fact that the revenue stream may be small, the hope is that it’ll get bigger.

But Story & Heart also engages a collaborative approach to filmmaking, beyond just licensing footage. Traveling the world shooting stories and giving workshops, the team at Stillmotion discovered something important. “One of the biggest things we learned,” Patrick tells me, is “nobody wants to be an island. Everybody wants a team. They want to work with people.” But rarely do they know how to make it happen. Through Story & Heart, “we can bring people together and really celebrate that idea of sharing our ideas, sharing our stories, sharing our footage to all.”

And this is the collaborative element. If you need footage from across the world for a commercial, for example, which could cost a lot of money, then “rather than me having to go out and film it,” Patrick believes, “I can actually save money to get footage that was shot by you that you cared about, that has story in mind, that is intentional, and if it fits with what I’m doing, we both win in this situation.” In fact, he feels that it “lets everybody win”, because it “helps the storytellers using the footage, it helps the storytellers selling the footage, and it brings people together in a new way so that we can collaborate on projects.”

They claim it’s the “world’s first story-driven platform,” and the website (storyandheart.com) states how the client can “compare clips with similar lighting, characters, and settings to determine which work best for your project. Even better, sequence them together to tell a cohesive narrative that looks like a custom shoot.”

Justin DeMers, who worked early on with Stillmotion when Patrick and Amina were still doing weddings, now runs Story & Heart. He feels the Story & Heart model works for freelancers, studios, and as a work for hire. He feels that its soul revolves around the needs of filmmakers in a world where concepts like saving for retirement, vacation, childcare, don’t exist for them. “And they don’t exist because it’s the nature of the industry to be largely a work for hire, where you work for a project, you get paid, you go onto the next project.” Justin adds, “It’s amazing to know that someone else has made use of something you put your heart and your blood and your sweat and your tears into in order to help bring another story alive.”

Placing footage online and collecting licensing fees from footage you’ve already shot can be an additional revenue builder. “Very few filmmakers haven’t even thought about or haven’t even been introduced to the idea of footage working for you long past it’s been delivered to the client,” Justin explains in their office. So they want filmmakers to submit footage to them so that they can join a community of other filmmakers, being involved in that community so you can help and be helped by others when you need it, and to “have your work constantly work for you.” It’s a great feeling to get an “email at two in the morning saying you’ve licensed some more footage, and you had to do nothing for it. It’s constantly working for you.” However, you need to make sure you own the footage if you’re working on a project for a client. While the footage may be only generating a small income, over the long term it may pay off as an additional, albeit modest, source of income. (Don’t expect to give up on getting clients as you won’t be living off the royalties of licensing your footage!)

Taxes

When you’re generating money, you’ll need to pay taxes, which is another aspect of running your business smoothly. This book does not profess to offer professional advice on taxes. The information provided here is for representative purposes only. You will want to hire a certified public accountant (CPA) or tax attorney to work with you on your taxes. For many years I filled out my own taxes and estimated my work and I didn’t realize I could have written off more expenses and actually could have saved money. Seek and use experts when it comes to taxes—even if you’re a one-person operation and not making that much money. For example, as a side business I made just under $4,000 in video work in 2014. My expenses (supplies, purchase of an EVF for my Digital Bolex, trips where I can write off my mileage, and airline fares exceeding $5,000) meant I took a loss—no net income from the business—so I did not have to pay taxes on that income. If I didn’t write off expenses, I would have owed over $1,000. Also, be careful that you are generating income and not doing work that looks like a hobby (which cannot be written off and may lead to an IRS audit). Your CPA will give you forms to fill out and then he or she will fill out your tax forms.

So the first step to take is to hire a good CPA or tax attorney. They will save you money. You will need to pay taxes and if you’re contracting out your services and/or operating as a single business owner, you will have to pay estimated income taxes (the money you make) and self-employment tax (social security and Medicare taxes) on a quarterly basis (see http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Self-Employed). Ask your CPA for details.

The good news revolves around all of your expenses—travel (including car mileage), research, wi-fi, mobile phone, equipment and gear purchases, postage, supplies (memory cards, printer cartridges), business meals—everything relating to your business can be written off in your taxes. Every piece of gear, supplies, percentage of your mobile phone used for business—everything. It could mean the difference between owing money and getting a tax refund.

If you work from home (such as an apartment), a part of your space can be used as a percentage of your rent or mortgage and can be written off as an expense against your taxes. If you have an 800-square-foot apartment and it costs you $1,000 a month in rent, you could say you use 25 percent of the space for your business, and write off $250 per month, which comes out as $3,000 for the year. Same with your phone, wi-fi, electricity, and other utilities. If your calls are about half personal and half business, then you can write off half of your mobile phone bill. If you travel to a shoot, whether driving or flying, or make an overnight trip (hotel expenses and restaurant expenses, the per diem), you can write that off, too. I wrote off my ticket to Jordan at $2,847, which offset my income of $3,500.

You can even write off part of your car. If you’re driving to locations to shoot and meeting potential clients, you can keep a log of your miles (from your odometer) and write these miles off against your income. If you’re using the car for personal use, then you’ll compute a certain percentage for work and personal use respectively. Some gear and computers can be depreciated over several years. As long as the life of the property is more than a year, you may use the value of the property as “an annual allowance for the wear and tear, deterioration, or obsolescence of the property” (http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/A-Brief-Overview-of-Depreciation). A good CPA or tax attorney will know all the ins and outs of what you need and what you can write off, and they will likely save you a lot more money—worth the fee they will charge.

The key point—keep your paperwork organized. Keep your receipts (even records of purchases with your credit card, which can be found online on your credit card’s website), invoices, a log of your miles for travel in your car, a list of your per diem (the amount you can write off for food and hotel stays), airline ticket purchases—everything! Put this material in a folder. I tend to put everything together for each project and staple it all together (including all receipts, maps, travel log), as well as all equipment and software purchased during the year.

For example, if you made $30,000 from your production house work (gross income), and you had $12,000 in expenses, you would only be taxed on earning $18,000. If you paid someone $1,000 to help out on a shoot, you can subtract it as contract labor and you’ll need to fill out a 1099 form, unless they’re an hourly worker, and then you’ll need a W2 form. However, if you placed that in your budget and was paid by the client, then you wouldn’t be able to include it.

One such company that does accounting for film projects, documentaries, internet projects, commercials, industrials, including low-budget productions, is ABS Payroll (http://abspayroll.com). They cover employment and payroll taxes (useful if you have a staff and/or a crew for a particular production), information about hiring independent contractors, and information about engaging in loan out companies (subcontractors with their own businesses). Their services also include production accounting, payroll, and workers’ compensation insurance. Their forms include a SAG form, request for a duplicate W2, a W9 form, employee time card, weekly crew time card, direct deposit form, request for contract services letter, and employment of a minor (see: http://www.abspayroll.net/industry-forms.html).

Here are some other recommendations:

• Open a separate business account at a bank or credit union distinct from your personal account.
• Use a credit card that’s dedicated to business use only.
• Balance your accounts every month.
• Keep all of your receipts, checks, invoices, and any paperwork related to your business.
• If you have a staff, you may want to consider subcontracting payroll (if you’re legally allowed to do so).

Taxes can be complicated and laws change every year—this is why it’s important to budget in a professional CPA or tax attorney and let them advise you on your legal rights when it comes to writing off expenses for taxes.