Are you a freelance videographer or editor? Lucky you! You get to choose the projects you work on. But with great power comes great responsibility. You don’t want to waste your time on terrible clients or boring brands. So how do you make smart decisions that will improve your craft, expand your portfolio, and further your career? Let’s explore the “Three P’s of Picking Projects”: passion, prestige, and profit.
Passion is a huge part of defining your own success. There are certain types of projects that we all gravitate to that don’t feel like work at all. These “passion” projects motivate you to dive in, try new things, and make the best work possible. Passion projects are sometimes few and far between, but they are highly important to your creative well-being. However, they are also often the types of projects that pay the least — but, they can be highly prestigious (think of a film getting into a festival, or winning an award).
When choosing a project, it’s also important to consider how the project will reflect back on you. If you’re in a corporate track, working with big corporate brands may offer a level of prestige that validates your work and your brand. Your work could also get a boost by appearing on a national stage and garnering thousands more views than anything you could do on your own.
This may be the most important tenet to consider. If video production is your career, you have to make decisions that will make you money to pay your bills. While passion and prestige are important — and can help garner higher profits in the future — at the end of the day, you will always need to consider what a project pays. As such, the most profitable projects are often the least prestigious and inspire the least passion. Some examples might include medical industry work, long-form HR training video series, or corporate explainer videos — to name a few…
So, if these are the three tenets of your video project decision-making rubric, your goal as a video professional is to find ways to maximize all three. Be upfront with potential clients about which tenets are lacking in a project. Fill in the gaps yourself. Don’t take on projects that sap your ability to balance the three. It’s up to you to understand your video project decision rubric and what’s best for your career. For more tips about navigating the world of freelance video production and editing, check out the following resources.
