We recently connected with Chris Bylsma and have shared our conversation below.
Chris, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?
I gave up a full-time living as an editor & graphic designer when I discovered my passion for acting in the film & TV industry, so right from the start I knew it was going to take awhile to build back up to how things were!
As an actor it took a lot of “dues paid” as I did small roles for credit/crafty only, 48hr films, & the like while networking & honing my own craft in the arena. Certainly there were many milestones along the way (1st decent-paying commercial, 1st indie lead, becoming SAG-AFTRA Eligible & joining on my 1st episodic co-star, & more), but one thing I think we miss as artists is the importance of valuing our own work much earlier than that.
It is crucially important to keep our focus on what drew our hearts to a passion for acting in the beginning, but really the only way to continue forward momentum & to make it sustainable full-time is by not only setting new goals BUT ALSO new limits. Developing your first day rate minimum (even if you aren’t union yet), turning down that role that wouldn’t meet your new benchmarks AND didn’t really speak to your soul anyway, etc.
It’s hard to not accept what could be a fun opportunity, but it’s just too easy for inertia to take hold while we’re on set again for 14hrs at $100/day. Then you look back ten years later & realize you never made this career move or achieved that goal, & it wasn’t for lack of effort or even that the gigs were BAD, but simply because we never set up any kind of structure to keep us propelled forward.
With my company Breakthrough Reels, that odyssey began early on in my acting endeavors, after I’d worked in Casting & as a Producer & Director. Those experiences really hammered home just how vital a role actor reels & clips play in our career path, so that was when I decided to put my previous experience as an editor back into play.
I started out just doing actor reels on the side to challenge myself & supplement when acting was slow, doing edits for a few friends while really not putting the business out there much. So again, it was a completely ground-up process to “full-time”, as I slowly built that client base up.
One of the most basic but most important pieces of starting a business in any industry is just keeping your head down & working hard with a determined persistence as you build. You’re going to have to tune out a lot of unsolicited opinions from people who haven’t even taken one day to study what you’ve put hundreds & then thousands of hours into fine-tuning.
It takes time to start any business & see real growth, & you’re going to have to turn down jobs where the client wants you to do specialized work for $50. You’ll also see PLENTY of new competition sprout up all around you; in the case of actor reels they may actually also do outstanding work, or it may just be somebody who decided today they can use iMovie & make a buck off actors.
But if you work extremely hard, treat people fairly & honestly, & authentically put everything into what’s best for your client’s career, you build real trust together & that leads to a truly remarkable working relationship over many years. Around 80% of Breakthrough Reels’ client base are actors I’ve worked directly with for 3-6 years at least now, & many actors have been with us for over a decade!
We’ve gone from editing for a few friends to a full-on editing specialty that has blown past that “10,000 hours to become an expert in what you do” threshold, as we ‘re now over 40,000 hours & counting of studying the ever-changing industry standards, getting direct feedback from Casting Directors & Producers, & of course doing the actual edits themselves.
We’ve collaborated with over 500 actors in every major market in the country, have done both thousands of clips & thousands of reel edits, & we design strategies for actors with anything from two indie films all the way up to current Series Regulars on network shows.
As with any business, there are big-picture business strategies, frameworks, & scalable processes, but the foundational keys for us have never changed: dedicated persistence in continually honing our craft, ALWAYS treating our client honestly & fairly, & the willingness to set limits. Turning down cut-rate offers & tuning out all the brand-new competition that sprouts up every month.
Know the value of your craft. Define & set new goals AND limits to keep driving your momentum. Tune out the noise!
Chris, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I consider myself an actor first-&-foremost, but creating & building my actor reel editing company (Breakthrough Reels) has been an incredibly fulfilling challenge that I never expected to join alongside my on-screen career!
I discovered acting in the indie film scene, where I first discovered that you “didn’t have to be in LA or NY to do it”. At that point I’d never acted in anything in my life, but I was interested enough to go to a few of those first auditions, & was fortunate to book pretty consistently early on.
Things started out with doing those films on the weekend as I continued my full-time work as a video editor & graphic designer, but pretty quickly I realized I had a burning passion for the creative challenges of building characters, & even on the hardest of sets I really loved the camaraderie that came from the whole crew & cast working to bring a story from script-to-screen!
I resigned my job to pursue acting opportunities & to self-study everything I could find on the different approaches to the craft & on filmmaking in general. I continued developing my own method on sets while creating on indie films, & eventually began to Cast, Direct, & Produce films as well, with many of them going on to win awards in film competitions or festivals.
Ultimately, even though I loved the creative process of indie films – & still do many to this day – I knew that I wanted to challenge myself further & see if I could break into the episodic storytelling movement of the 2010s.
That proved to be the perfect career move as I was able to bring roles to life in Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Til Dawn” (El Ray) & many other shows, was trusted by Scott Frank to give unscripted the “Tis A Fearful Thing To Love” poem for the series finale of Godless, worked with Tom Hanks & Paul Greengrass in News of the World, got to be directed by Vincent D’Onofrio in The Kid, joined my all-time favorite episodic universe (Breaking Bad) while working with Vince Gilligan & Aaron Paul, & made countless other memories on set.
As always, there isn’t an actor out there who can achieve their goals without an incredible team – & I am forever thankful for mine! We’ve achieved a lot more over the last few years & are always setting new goals for an exciting future.
With my editing company Breakthrough Reels, I started that up after learning just how important actor clips & reels are in actors even getting the next audition – much less getting cast or reaching any of our goals!
When it came time to shop around to see who I wanted to do my first reel, I saw mostly big companies on the coasts that didn’t seem to value the quality of their work, clearly didn’t know what Casting really needed to see in a reel, & didn’t care to actually identify what their actor’s strengths were so they could tailor their edits specifically to that actor’s career path.
They were creating perfectly serviceable video collections of an actor’s work that their friends & family would enjoy; but whether that actor had to pay $100 or $1,000 for that edit, in my mind that money was entirely wasted because they weren’t getting a tool that could actually be used to get them booked again.
Fortunately I already had years of experience as a video editor, so I was able to skip all the hours needed to even become technically proficient & could jump directly into the further study of actor marketing & branding, the art of tailoring reel edits that had become “all about the formula” to the individual instead, & – perhaps just as importantly – getting direct feedback from Casting Directors, Producers, & Directors about what worked for them with clips & reels & what didn’t.
That alone set Breakthrough Reels miles ahead of the curve, & also made it clearly evident to our actors how much we cared about seeing & showcasing THEM as human beings & artists, as well as helping them to advance their careers.
One of the things I’m most proud of in building this business are the hundreds of authentic working relationships & partnerships that has led to, rather than taking that same path of predictable, assembly-line style “reel edits” that big corporations were on just to churn out a product & keep their hourly rate as high as possible.
We also do the occasional custom reel scenes at Breakthrough Reels, where we write, produce, direct, & edit material for actors who are either just starting out, transitioning from theatre to film, or who are trying to break out of typecasts. But that market is even more saturated by coastal companies by now that we frequently turn down opportunities to do those productions, just like we turn down all overtures to edit narrative films, commercials, etc.
Because a crucial part of BTR’s success, & part of what makes us so different, has been the core mandate that we maintain our vision on ONLY clip & reel edits. The industry is so massive, the standards from market-to-market are too varied, & the “rules” are so frequently changing that I believe to be true specialists in our field it takes nothing less than constant & consistent focus on our specialty for us to be able to deliver actors the level of material they deserve.
That leads to our actors knowing with concrete certainty that our centerpiece will always be the strategies we create together to best market them with their material that they currently have, & then executing the resulting edits at a level that very few other companies who try & “do everything” can.
Because of that singularity of focus & our commitment to honest & authentic relationships with our clients, we’ve gone from a little start-up company to working with over 500 actors in every major market in the country, as well as thousands of unique strategies & edits.
One final thing that I am incredibly proud of is the growth of the actor’s career that we get to be a very small part of!
Our client bases is almost entirely actors we’ve collaborated with for 2-8 years, with some at or over a decade; so it’s truly incredibly to get to see them go from stuck at an indie film every year & a half & considering quitting the business all the way up to their first network co-star, Guest Star, or recurring roles.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
For me, the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is that it allows me to hone & share the talents that I feel I have been gifted with.
We all have ways in which we are innately talented, whether in an “artistic” avenue or elsewhere, to such a degree that we don’t have to bash our head against a wall our entire life just to finally develop that area into a “skill”. That can be done, & it’s important to make the sacrifices to do that at times; but to me it leads to a more fulfilling life when we’re able to channel all that hard work & energy instead into where we already have natural strengths to share.
I’ve worked many jobs in my life & I’ve tried to pour my efforts & myself into various channels & containers for a litany of reasons; but it wasn’t until I discovered & unlocked where I was truly gifted that I felt all of those hours dedicated were really “all worth it”. That they were honoring a piece of my heart & my truest self, & that I was then able to share that in my own small way with others & touch their hearts as well.
For me that has been such an incredible phenomenon & so authentically rewarding that I honestly don’t think I could go back to living any version of my old life, where I was just trying to muscle through & do the thing within the timeframe because that’s what you do.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I feel like there are a million of them in my acting journey especially, because anyone who wants to be an actor better be armed with an extremely resilient nature!
We’ve come a long way in finally reforming some of the industry “standards” (or lack thereof), have been able to implement some reasonable limitations that benefit actors, & have quite a few more informational avenues available that can hopefully be helpful tools along the way.
But it’s still one of the most arduous & absurdly arbitrary career paths you can choose to pursue…so you just have to truly love it!
For myself, I’ve had to move to a new market where I essentially knew not one single person – twice! I had to resign a lead role that I desperately wanted to do because the industry had me so dispirited that I knew I couldn’t handle that role anymore. To me that too is resilience, being willing to do the last thing you want to do, because your mental health just HAS to come first.
Like many actors, back in the day I had to live in cramped studios with terrible landlords, places with no heat or AC, had to go through months of allowing myself “only the minimum” in everything until the next gig because I’d made a commitment to myself to only accept industry work.
All of the above are things that may be where you draw your line, so everyone should do what is right & best for you. Don’t just “be resilient” because you think you have to do the hard thing.
But the reality is that those who finally break through in this industry are many times the ones that find a way to “hang on the longest”; so if you love it so much that you really can’t do anything else…then you may well find yourself in situations like these. And then you know what you have to do.
One of my go-to stories is from one of those really terrible stretches where I’d just uprooted my life to move & was in some pretty unsustainable living conditions. Nothing seemed to be trending in the right direction with acting, & Breakthrough Reels was still relatively small at the time, so I finally reached a point where I felt it was time to turn my back on acting, move home, & somehow find something else I could do.
I agonized over every possibility & ultimately decided I would cash out my small Roth IRA from my old 9-5 days & stretch that money as far as I could to give myself six more months. And if nothing had changed at that point…I was done.
That’s a terrible move financially if you’re thinking big-picture, & I was [wisely] advised against it, but one of the anomalies inherent to chasing a dream is the paradoxical nature of what truly is “big-picture thinking”.
It was an indisputable fact that the money I’d get at that time was nothing compared to what it COULD & SHOULD BE fifty years from then; but I knew in my heart of hearts that if I just gave up on acting without allowing myself that one last shot…that was something I verifiably could not live with fifty years from then.
So I cashed it out, got a new incredibly inhospitable (but incredibly cheap!) place on a 6 month lease, cut everything to “only the minimum” once again, & figured I’d just have to find my daily joy in stoicism!
A few months later I booked my first network co-star (From Dusk Til Dawn), & then booked again & then again. An indie feature that would later end up on Hallmark, an NBC show, another feature with some big names attached to it, then my role as Pastor Garret Moore in the series finale of Netflix’s Emmy-nominated “Godless”, & finally a TNT Pilot to close the year.
There were many moments that required resilience leading up to that crossroads, & there have been many since as well. But I always look back at that time where I was right on the edge of giving it all up, before I decided I had to find the courage to make the unconventional move once more & give it one last chance.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bylsmadness/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Bylsmadness/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@breakthroughreels4867
- Other: Breakthrough Reels Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breakthroughreels/
