Starting The Freelance Game Early

Starting The Freelance Game Early

Becoming a freelance content creator was an interesting time for me, and I’m glad that you brought that up.

I’ve sort of taught myself ¹ many, if not all, of the skills I now use in my day to day life, and as the backbone of my entrepreneurship. Knowing how to do a lot is strangely not encouraged in the freelance world. Many online tutorials on how to get your foot in the door, of whatever industry you’re attacking, say to “specialize” or “find your niche.” That way, people looking for that specific job can find you and not someone else. When confronted with the choice of specializing or to continue what I’ve been doing ² . I chose to continue what I’ve been doing ³ .

Being a generalist allows you to have a more than basic understanding of each aspect of a project, allowing you to make smarter, more informed decisions about the project as a whole.

I started my freelance career during middle school after a couple of my friends and I wanted to start a YouTube channel ⁴ . I learned how to properly record my computer screen and edit the footage ⁵ . I learned how to make the art for the channel, eventually teaching myself how to use photoshop ⁶ .

That was it, after working on those two things for maybe three months, a friend of a friend from another school asked me if I could make some art for his channel. All I asked was what he was looking for and how much, I knew I could deliver ⁷ . It was a success; earning me $35 dollars in total, I was hooked on the freedom of having my own cash money.

In between, my middle school career ⁸ and having a more dependable client base, I spent time doing odd, media related, jobs for my friends. One summer I spent as an intern at a local radio station. This experience really built upon my already present appreciation for audio engineering and helped shape the audiophile I am today.

I would later start to use a website to look for freelance jobs, this helped me find one of my most consistent clients, Cody Carrera. Cody is a singer-songwriter based out in Atlanta, that I produce video content for. Like I said he’s out in Atlanta so being on set for a shoot isn’t really an option. Cody sends me footage, tells me exactly what he wants and I deliver. On more than one occasion my audio knowledge has helped improve the final product, whether it’s noise reduction, or equalizing audio for better clarity in dialogue, or as simple as keeping all the audio at a nice even level.

Through this process I’m picking up skill after skill ⁹ . However, personally, I don’t think I’m too great at any one of them, and that there lies my problem. After years of watching videos on how to make a website for your business, how to talk yourself up, how to present yourself in a profession manor ¹⁰ , how to properly advertise yourself, they all say one thing. Find your niche. This means to specialize, find one specific thing to do and be really good at it. This is good advice. This is probably a safe way to go. However. My personal fear is that I’ll become at a point too specialized, where it would be too hard to find work that fits my niche. This is why I haven’t done this. I don’t think I could ever do this. I love doing it all, too much. I suppose I'm a generalist, and that might be a bad thing. Someone might not want to hire a generalist because they want someone just to do one thing really, really well and they’re willing to pay big money to make that happen but I argue that because a generalist is competent in so many fields they’re able to see the bigger picture and they’re able to see how certain aspects of one part of a project can influence and inspire other parts.

[1] taught myself should be in quotes here because I don’t really think I did. I used a host of YouTube videos, tutorials, and free online PDFs, so yes I did do this on my own, but I was using the knowledge that other people had provided to me, yes I know that's sort of what all teaching is, but I feel like the term 'self-taught' gives a feeling of heightened understanding and that I sort of 'figured it out' with no one's help but that's simply not the case

[2] which is simply, learning which ever skills I find myself lacking to the point where it solves the problem, and sometimes learning the skill to the point where I’d retain the knowledge

[3] see footnote 2

[4] my friend’s, Gabe and Dayton and I always wanted to be YouTubers and play video games for a living, sadly its sort of a cliche now, we spent a lot of our time playing Minecraft, one of the only games my computer could run and barely even at that. Dayton was sort of the idea man, I was the one to make it happen and Gabe was sort of an actor almost, there for his perfect comedic timing. He didn't contribute much outside of being in the videos though. We had so many ideas, we recorded ourselves playing custom maps people had built, PvP (Player vs. Player) fights, and we even did a couple sketches, which were absolutely horrendous, the channel was called TimeConsumerz if you want to check it out, I highly suggest you don't

[5] I used a software called ScreenFlow to record and edit our videos. This really taught me the basics of timeline based video editing, cutting, and the rearrangement of clips

[6] that experience got me familiar with Pixelmator a, at the time, free browser-based photo editor. The logo was pretty basic, a black and white gradient and two letters in a fun font on the front

[7] once word got out about my amazing abilities and lack of after school activities, he asked me to make some channel art for him, he said he would pay me too. He wanted his face photoshopped onto the faces of a small group of Jawas (Jawas, if you don’t know, are the short, little desert scavengers in the Star Wars canon)

[8] Dayton had spent his time creating and abandoning a series of different YouTube channels. Of which I made several logos for and, eventually, 2D animations

[9] a load of bargaining skills which I learned from trying to come to a price both me and the client could agree upon, but also the actual skills I’m teaching myself as well, such as video, photo and audio editing, animation, logo design, and visual effects

[10] never really got that one