We recently connected with Ryan Wilson and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I started in video production with a few different more traditional positions. I was a videographer/editor at a digital marketing company, a public access station, and also for an online news outlet that covered sports teams in New Orleans. The goal was always to go full-time freelance, so I would pick up gigs on the side to bring in more money, learn more, and network with local people in the industry. My department ended up getting cut from one of these companies, just for me to go to another job and have the same thing happened again. It was kind of a realization that in this field, the concept of stability really doesn’t exist, so I’d rather be doing the kind of work that I wanted to do. I liked many of the upsides of freelance such as being my own boss and building my own business, not having a fixed schedule, and being able to get on a variety of different types of shoots, but I was nervous to fully pull the trigger. The constant paychecks are important in an expensive area like the DMV, plus having a wife and a dog. I’m really, really glad I was freelancing on the side for as long as I had been before deciding to go with it full-time. I wouldn’t have had any clients, any network, or any knowledge of how the business works. To really be able to make a living from it however, all of this needed to kick up even more. I needed more clients, and more connections to bring me on set. I spent a lot of time trying to connect with people on set, find gigs wherever I could, and often even bring people on set with me when the budget was tight, just so I could meet more people and hopefully have them return the favor. Very much believing in the “invest in yourself” mindset, I was also taking gigs that were below where I was in my knowledge, again, just to network. Because I committed to it full-time after I lost one of my jobs and I already had a decent base, I was lucky enough to be profitable pretty quickly, and my workload grew exponentially after the first year to where I was getting work that I really wanted to do, and also that made sense financially. I would encourage people trying to have success in this field to know their worth for sure, but to also set their ego aside and understand that until you reach a certain level where you definitely don’t want to go backwards, taking a PA job here and there even though you think you’re “above it” is totally okay. It’s about finding a balance.

Ryan , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I got into film because I couldn’t figure out what my major should be in college and eventually thought “well, I like movies”. I picked Film and Video Studies, and eventually just based on class selection, ended up having a concentration in Video Production. I couldn’t have possibly fallen backwards into this more if I’d tried, but it worked out so incredibly well. It’s easily the biggest stroke of luck in my life, because it’s turned out to be the most fun career ever and has been my biggest passion for the last ten years. Before having full-time jobs in video and eventually going fully freelance, I had a lot of customer service jobs. I think that has really helped me out in this field now. I learned so much with how to communicate with stressed out clients, which is something you can often run into. I’m constantly managing producers on set who have various concerns, and they really appreciate when we are able to calmly talk through these concerns as opposed to getting all worked up and not reaching any positive resolution. Many times I’ve been told by clients in one way or another that I was hired because they liked my work, but they continued to keep working with me after because they really liked working with me as well. I can’t stress this enough. It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, people don’t want to work with other people that they don’t like. I always try to bring positivity and a fun time to set, and it has helped me a ton.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

What I did was simply buy equipment as it became necessary. I didn’t want to buy a ton of gear and then have no work to justify it – that wouldn’t make sense. So I waited. Obviously some of the gear are staples like a camera, tripod, etc. I would buy these things with money I had saved up from previous work, and I was extremely selective in what I would buy. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of future-proofing and buy an Arri Alexa or something just so I could get clients that say “we’ll pay $500.00 for a video!”, but I also didn’t want to buy a very cheap camera that would last a year at best and never get me decent enough image quality to be able to pitch myself to higher clients. Then as jobs came up, I would use credit to purchase necessary gear. If someone needed me to AC and the day rate was 650.00, but I needed to have my own kit, I’d go spend $100.00 or whatever ahead of time to build that kit, knowing that now I had a job where it was needed. I did that for nicer lenses, lights, a gimbal, and so on, until I built a really nice kit and haven’t had to purchase much new gear for a while.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I think NFTs have a real beneficial role for many artists, depending on their medium and with the understanding of what they are doing. I hear a lot of people saying NFTs are “a big crypto scam!”. They are not. There are ways they can be treated as such by scammers and traders looking to make a quick buck, but that isn’t their intended purpose. If a photographer mints an NFT of one of their photos, they can make it so every time it is sold, they get a percentage. If someone sells a beautiful landscape photo for $500.00, and then later that initial buyer sells it for $600.00, that photographer can get 10% and make $60.00. That will continue on. Not to mention NFTs make it so the true creator of that aren’t will always be known and it can’t be ripped off. These are all good things.

Contact Info:

• Website: rwilsonfilms.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanwilson_films/

Image Credits
Matthew Burgess Miles Huffman