We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rachel Taylor a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rachel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?
I truly am happy as a business owner. I continue to learn something new every day, and I’m glad to know that I still have plenty of opportunities for growth. I am grateful for where my business is now in comparison to where it was when it was conceptualized in 2019.
As a freelance filmmaker and photographer, I frequently work with other freelancers who have full-time jobs in non-creative fields. Because of this, I am often asked if freelancing is my “main” or “side” job, and I’m left to think about what my life would be like if I had a regular job that occupied the majority of my time.
Years ago, I concluded that unless absolutely necessary, I would not take on a regular job because it makes no sense to me why I would put myself in a position to have to request time off (and potentially be denied) to accept and go to work in the field of what it is that I actually want to do. While I attended school at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Atlanta campus, my mom reinforced her encouragement of me pursuing my creative career. She told me that if she didn’t believe I had the capacity or drive to be successful in such an uncertain industry, she would’ve had me enroll at our local university to get a degree in business. We joke about that to this day.
The success I’ve earned and experienced in my career so far certainly helps, but no one in my family envisions me as someone who has a “regular” job. I have always been encouraged to be my own person with my own beliefs and desires. My loved ones instilled in me that I can achieve anything I set my mind to, even if no one in the family has walked the same path before. My support system, new and old, strengthen my feelings of security in a field where nothing is guaranteed, because they love the fact that I am on the path to making a living by working in the industry of what I love to do. I am grateful to be in this position because unfortunately many people’s circumstances don’t allow them to do the same. I have and will continue to be an advocate against the plight of just surviving and being stuck in the cycle of living to work and working to live.
I love that by living and working for myself, I am able to inspire others around me to at least think about the idea that they can enjoy the work they do every day. I’ll end this with a quote I enjoyed from Pinterest: “You often feel tired, not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am Rachel Olivia Taylor, cinematographer and overall creative. I am 23 years old, born and raised in Charlotte, NC. I earned my bachelor’s in fine arts degree with a major in Film and Television from the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where I graduated in 3 years thanks to the college credits I earned in a middle college program during my last two years of high school.
I gained an interest in graphic design when I was 14 years old, running multiple celebrity fan pages and editing photos together for content. This progressed to an interest in film when I began putting my edited photos in a sequence with music layered in the background. I then discovered the role of a Cinematographer during my 10th grade year, when I had to select the specific salary of my desired job for a budget project in my civics and econ class. I knew that film was my industry of choice, but a bit of research helped me officially decide what I wanted my role to be in the filmmaking process. As the head of the camera department, I enjoy the excitement and responsibility of acting as a painter, using all of the tools of the various departments (camera, lighting, locations, art, etc.) like they are paint, brushes and other instruments to bring to life the illustrations of each frame. This is what I do. I cannot imagine living this life in the full-time pursuit of anything else.
My very first union film set experience was in December of 2020. I was taking virtual classes from my home in Charlotte, NC, and one of my professors mentioned that his wife was working on an Oprah Whitney Network (OWN) series in the city. At the end of the quarter, my professor gave me his wife’s email and told me to send her my resume. Thanks to the 16+ SCAD productions I worked on during my first year of enrollment, I was more than prepared to send it to her. A week passed and I was taking my first of many COVID tests in preparation to start work as a day-playing Production Assistant on the 1st season of the OWN series “Delilah.” I began virtual classes again in January of 2021. Because of my networking skills and connections made during my time on “Delilah,” I earned the role of a Walkie Production Assistant working full-time on my first feature film “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” in March. From there, my network and range of opportunities snowballed with a plethora of commercials and other short-form productions throughout the summer of 2021.
Outside of my work as a cinematographer, I am a film director, camera operator, screenwriter and photographer. To each project and production, I bring my 5 years of lived experiences in the film industry, as well as my cultivated skills of narrative storytelling, imaginative world building and creative composition.
What sets me apart from others is that I am my own person, with creatives whom I admire, but do not idolize or intend to imitate. If presented with the same idea as another, my perspective of any project will always result in a unique execution. In circumstances where I have an idea that is similar to how someone presented something before, I will not try to reinvent the wheel, as that is an ineffective use of my and the client’s time. However, I will use my previous experience and innovative problem-solving skills to make each project stand out on its own and execute it with excellence.
I am open and eager to work worldwide and willing to be a contributor to productions in camera department roles.
I am most proud of my journey. It is far from over, and I am immensely grateful for how far I’ve come since it began. From before I considered the world of filmmaking, to the beginning of my college career, to my success beyond college graduation, I am grateful for my upbringing, which held few limitations on what I could or couldn’t pursue or achieve. Because of this, I have had the opportunity to pursue my passions. I’ve been paid to work in the field of what I love to do since I was 19 years old. While my journey has not been linear and I couldn’t have predicted each step of it if I tried, I cannot imagine living any other life but mine.
I am excited to share that I will be the Director of Photography on an upcoming short film with the working title “Thank You for Your Time.” For the first time, I will be teaming up with my good friend and colleague Ricki Nelson, director of the award winning short film “I Am Not Your Black Girl.”
“Thank You for Your Time” dives into the life of a young woman who is stuck in a corporate job, forced into a surreal confrontation with her council of coworkers, the source of her workplace trauma, and the company’s peculiar HR representative, as she tries to escape her final exit interview.
With principal photography beginning on January 31st , we are just weeks away from bringing this story from script to screen, and we appreciate all of the support of our creative communities and those who support our filmmaking journey.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Like many of my peers, my journey as a creative has not been linear. Just because I went to film school in Atlanta, doesn’t mean that I was a shoo-in to automatically work with Marvel or Tyler Perry Studios. Just because I have worked full-time on 5 feature films does not, by any means, indicate I am monetarily “rich”. The pay rate of a Production Assistant does not cover the cost of living in majority of the 50 United States.
I have achieved many of my career goals in the short time I’ve worked in this industry. I have had Getty Images of myself appear under Google search results of my name since I was 20 years old. Despite the innumerable milestones I have reached, I have yet to claim my goal status of being a full-time freelance cinematographer. In May of 2024, I earned my first day on set as a Digital Utility person in the camera department on a union show, and a job as a non-union 2nd Assistant Camera person on a different shoot a few days later. The following 3 months were filled with non-union camerawork, and I genuinely believed I might have breached the point of no return between being a Production Assistant and being in my desired department. September came and I was day-playing as a Production Assistant on union sets again. Nothing is linear.
I think it would be helpful for non-creatives to understand that creative journeys are consistently on an uneven playing field. Many careers with greater guaranteed stability provide the promise of advancement within a company or career if certain steps are taken, classes are attended, and degrees are earned. I personally know about the same number of creatives who have not attended higher education to learn their craft, as the number of those I know who did, myself included. Many of them I met on the same film sets or during the same equipment rental house workshops. No matter what the journey of how we arrived looks like, we all made it to the same place. To me, that is what matters.
While some creative roles are created within companies that work 9-5, much of the creative industry quite the opposite. Crew members won’t always know when their next job will be after the show they were working on has wrapped. Screenwriters may be left full of ideas with nowhere to implement them if a series they were working on gets canceled or put on an indefinite HIATUS.
I can’t speak for everyone in the industry, but I will say this: we do this because we love it. The hours can be ridiculous (I’m talking 14 to 16+ hour days); days on end of overnight shoots where you’re coming home as the sun rises and going to sleep when your entire household is waking up for the day; mileage on your car as you drive to and from crew parking on God-knows-what kind of terrain each day; and the only consistent thing being the concern of job security because if a union decides they want to be compensated fairly for their work, studios may decide they’re asking for too much, and in turn press pause on the entire industry until further notice.
Creatives are the people behind your favorite shows, characters, storylines and so much more. We work tirelessly with talented and dedicated people to bring to life the stories that make you feel something. We create worlds for you to dive into when you want to forget about the real world sometimes. No, this work is not easy, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling of an experience if it was. I’m not asking that you understand all that it takes to maneuver through our domain, but rather that you give us some grace as we are still figuring it out for ourselves.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I desire to see unambiguous Black people on screen in roles outside of drug dealers, slaves, baby mamas and every other “Black Trauma Porn” fantasy that Hollywood has been obsessed with force-feeding to unwilling, and/or uneducated audiences.
Black people are not a monolith. It is completely absurd to believe otherwise, and quite odd that it is still unimaginable to some people that there could be something as simple as a Black mermaid, a Black demigod, or even a Black person just existing in the world of a fantasy drama series. Black people exist in the real world. The goal and mission of my creative journey is to properly represent us in the various realms on our TV screens, too.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rotaylorlegacy.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/queentaylor22/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelotaylor/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV1buFqiBmHOnFI1t-0I_Jg?view_as=subscriber
- Other: IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm11379750/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/rotaylorlegacy
Image Credits
Dylan Duru, Kaya Roy, Neema Jade, Rachel O. Taylor, Rou Marcellus