Freelance Reality: How to Stay Sane When Work Disappears
It’s Monday, 09:18 in the morning. The crema is slowly disappearing on my espresso as I refresh my inbox for the 17th time since I got up at 08:00. Where’s the work? Have I been forgotten? Do people actually like to work with me? What if nothing comes in this month, or ever again? All these questions race through my head at breakneck speed, repeatedly, ad nauseam. I consider myself to be a pretty resilient and generally relaxed person but it’s been two weeks since I worked on anything and the silence is slowly and relentlessly wearing me down, pulling bits of me out to sea.
A previous version of me would have languished here forever, slowly spiralling into sadness and possibly even depression. That’s the reality of life for many creatives, the highs really are dizzying and the lows are truly terrifying, trawling the depths of despair. As a lifestyle, it’s unsustainable and it doesn’t take long for it to affect family life. The thing is, only one person can stop this from happening - you. And it requires a moment of epiphany and a complete change of mindset.
I was in this place for so long during my career, spurred on only by the drive to not completely and utterly fail. My creativity waned, I didn’t do many passion projects and became solely focused on paid work, which I quite often didn’t care that much about. That was until I realised many of the things I was worrying about were completely out of my control. Whether a project comes in or not falls down to a huge chain of things. Client needs, agency budgets, producers, directors. I can’t wave my hand and influence any of this, so I started focusing on the things I could control, reaching out to old clients, sparking conversations with possible new collaborators, researching new techniques and levelling up my skills and more importantly I would do it every day. That’s the key - consistency.
I don’t give a shit what any guru or LinkedIn influencer has to say, Feast or Famine is part of the deal if you’re a working DoP and can’t be tamed. Simply on the basis that, let’s be frank you are in an incredibly privileged position to work in the Film & Television industry as a creative lead in a job that means you aren’t needed most of the year but get paid enough to be able to sustain a very good quality of life on as little as 5 days a month. Let’s do some quick math, 5 days x £1000 per day = £5000 per month x 12 = £60,000. Assume two months of no work at all = £50,000 per year. The average experienced DoP is working anywhere from 100-150 days per year.
Sounds great, but this is the thing about math, it reduces things to formulas. That 100-150 days a year is assuming you have a consistent stream of projects and that means you need a network of people who will hire you. Once you start working and develop a network, which takes years by the way, you can’t just decide to stop networking one day and this is what so many freelancers do. They get comfortable with the clients they have, but if for whatever reason the work doesn’t come in, they panic and start spamming DMs at new people, essentially begging to be noticed and hired. I’m not judging, well maybe a little, because I’ve been there, I’ve done it. I look back on many of the messages I have sent and they honestly make me wince. It’s the usual stuff that every freelance professional has sent: Brief message (because that’s what you’ve been told to do), thinly veiled ‘researched’ comment about their work (You looked at their website and previous posts - THAT’S NOT RESEARCH), close with an invitation to chat or grab coffee (You’ve been told to do that as well). Here’s the thing: that template message will work 0% of the time because you’re a freelancer, not a sales manager chasing a Saas lead.
For us, working with someone has to be about much more than just getting paid. The coaches and gurus championing the idea of spamming connection requests every day and messaging all the people who engage with your content and trying to strike up completely cold conversations are pushing the spammiest networking model imaginable and it isn’t going to work. First of all the connections aren’t good connections, you don’t know anything about most of these people, and most of the work you get from them, if you get any at all, isn’t work you will likely want to do.
That also presents a new stress, now you need to log on to LinkedIn every day, find 10-15 people, connect with them, comment on posts, make posts yourself - all of this probably through a filter of disingenuity. If you connect with someone just because they are vaguely connected to your industry but don’t actually care about getting to know them, how is that a good starting point for collaboration? By all means, use LinkedIn to find people, but if after an hour of targeted research, you find no one of interest, that’s fine. For example, I would love to collaborate with more directors and producers working in documentaries and adventure filmmaking, but finding ones who I am genuinely interested to chat to, meet and eventually work together with is a slog. I might find two or three people of that nature a year, and we might not work together for months or even years. There’s always people to reach out to though, and always consider the long game. What might only be an opportunity to do some corporate docs now could turn into a multi-week hiking project coming your way later on.
You need to find people and reach out in a way that is easy for you to do consistently. You can’t just throw out thousands of messages in the hope one of them lands, it doesn’t work like that. Have a schedule - Monday, research productions, shows you like, find people. Tuesday - Research the people you’ve found, that means more than a cursory look over their social media feeds. Tuesday is also a good day to email your previous clients, which should be more of a check in and less of a please hire me email. Wednesday - connect and message new people. LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever is the better platform. DON’T ASK FOR WORK!
This is the mistake that every freelancer tends to make. Remember you’re messaging another creative human being, so in essence think of it like messaging yourself, are you in a position to offer a random person work? Would you? Probably not, so why are you saying ‘it would be good to collaborate some time’? Would it? I don’t know you, you could be crap as far as I know. And lose all the LinkedIn speech, seriously. The thing about LinkedIn is a lot of people on LinkedIn forget the most important thing of all. We are all human beings, we are not businesses or careers, we’re people. So as simple as it sounds, just talk like a person. That means if you aren’t feeling that confident today, or you’ve got a bit of a cold, maybe you stutter when you’re nervous - none of that matters because you’re human and if what you have to say is interesting to another person, they will listen to you. And whatever you do, don’t automate it. Don’t send voice notes as a ‘hook’ or any of this shit. It’s a technique, which means lots of people will use it, which means savvy people will know it’s disingenuous. There aren’t any hacks to this that actually work. You can send a message with a connection request but you don’t have to, it doesn't matter. But Tom, LinkedIn connection requests without a message have a bigger chance of being accepted. Yeah, because the message you sent was creepy as hell, it has nothing to do with complicated marketing psychology, you came across like a weirdo, clearly hunting for work. If it were me, I wouldn’t reply either.
In today’s world, we are all running around with these bizarre social media facing identities looking like confident, well put together people, who always know what they are talking about, always engaged and ready for anything. Bullshit, every last human on this planet would rather be in their underpants eating cereal in bed until midday. I’m not saying be super casual to the extent that you would be with your friends, but lose the fear, realise that your message didn’t hinder someone’s day at all, it wasn’t annoying to receive. You can actually compliment people about their work, it’s not weird and in most cases it will be met with genuine thanks and modesty. That person on the other side is just as self-doubting, unsure and going through highs and lows as much as you so it probably felt really good to be complimented. Conversations don’t have to be complicated but they need to be more than surface level small talk. Start with something you have in common, the state of the industry, location, geek out on camera tech, whatever, not: ‘I’m reaching out because I’m passionate about leveraging creative storytelling to drive brand impact, and I think there could be some amazing synergies between what you’re doing at [Insert Company Name] and what I’m building with my clients at [Insert Your Company].’ You sound like a soulless robot that didn’t cry at the end of Gladiator like a normal person. Oh, and don’t talk about AI, no one wants to talk about AI, AI is not an interesting topic of conversation. Only people obsessed with AI talk about AI. Stop it.
One thing I love about being a freelancer is that wisdom comes much faster to you than if you work in a full time position. Sure, you might learn your craft and get good in a full time position, but spend the same amount of time as a freelancer and you will be 10x as wise to not only the ways of the world, but the inner machinations of your mind - and if you think that last statement was a bit grand, I heard Patrick Star in my head as I wrote it.
Businesses always talk about growth and to them that is a successful state driven by profit, revenue, finding more customers, all the usual LinkedIn vomit streak. As a freelancer you improve when you find success, but you grow when you fail. Treating failure in this twisted way we’ve been conditioned to approach it with, is toxic for a freelancer. I can only write this blog now because I have failed repeatedly at the networking side of my career. I was too cautious. I overthought messages, often didn’t send them at all. I emailed generic enquiry addresses with rambling cover-letter style notes. I did it all, realised it didn’t work, and altered my approach. Eventually I found my voice, the way I feel comfortable and engaged in a conversation. I’m naturally introverted and for a long time that meant I thought I needed to be introverted online, this is of course completely false, so instead I changed my tone to be the confident, knows-what-the-fuck-he’s-talking-about DoP that I am on set, which coincidently is the person I wanted to be when I was younger.
The Feast of Famine periods you go through aren’t failures by themselves, that’s just the ebb and flow of the industry, but how you lost your mind, started walking in circles and pressing the panic button is the failure, it’s a failure to acknowledge the deal you made with yourself when you became a freelancer, it’s a failure to keep being consistent and it’s a failure by allowing self-sabotaging thoughts and imposter syndrome to creep in. However, this failure is good, but only if you dive deep and explore it. If you do become depressed, or saddened is probably a better term and less of a medical diagnosis, then allow yourself to feel, allow yourself to cry because until you do, you won’t find a way to climb out of that pit. Once you truly understand what’s driving it and yourself, once you understand the failure you won’t make that same mistake again. The deafening silence after projects will come around again but if you keep it together, learn what keeps you consistent and power through without crying yourself to sleep or losing yourself to doomscrolling until 2AM you will have grown and you will have become wiser.
So much in life is out of our control, which is why you shouldn’t depend on most things. LinkedIn, Instagram, these are just platforms that could crash or go offline tomorrow. The same can be said of whatever email platform you use, your phone provider’s service. Your network of people could fall apart, someone could leave the industry entirely leaving you without contacts. As a freelancer, your career direction falls entirely on you, so focus on what you can control, diversify the ways you go about doing things and most importantly - stay consistent.
