Free Lancing

I am totally n00b in there area of freelancing. I was wondering if any of youz who do freelance could give meh a few pointers on getting started. I can model organic things fairly well. I can do inorganic with the right references. I can also do illustration.

Any infos youz can provide meh with would be stupidly appreciated.

Sank you.:smiley:

If you are going to freelance, you’ll have to clean up your act. No more n00b, youz or mehs. You must be totally professional. You can also expect to spend at least half your time drumming up business, so factor that into your rates. People like to hire freelancers with experience, so you need some work under your belt, done for other people. Find some worthy charity that needs some work done, and do it for free.

No more n00bz:eek:. NOOOOOOOzz.

Okay, I got that out of my system. I only use this language in forums anyway so, I guess it won’t be too bad. Actually I’ve written on a college level since middle school. :cool: What do you mean buy drumming up business, though? Like, business cards and ads, or searching?

Fill the net with your good work. Mostly use www.youtube.com to upload the animations.

Ok, I’ve been working for myself for the past ten years, as architectural visualizer. Here are a few tips from my experience, it may be diferent for others, but for me it works. I have clients around the country, 90% of them are professional architects.

  1. Don’t be a ‘freelancer’. Setup a business, even if it is not registered. In fact my business is not registered as company, for tax reasons. Anyway, your prospective clients want someone reliable and professional. An inexperienced freelancer gives the idea of an unemployed graphics enthusiast with a computer at home. Someone with a business card, letterhead, etc. gives the impression of a professional business.

  2. Make business cards, letterheads, standard forms for quotation, invoicing, etc. Setup a professional looking website, printed brochure of your work and dvd with your work on it.

  3. Go and see prospective clients. This can be an art in itself.
    Don’t just phone and tell the receptionist that you are a freelancer looking for work and therefore want to speak to the big boss. Rather find out his name and ask to speak to Mr Whatever (or Ms Whatever). Often the receptionist will want to know your name and your business. Then just give your name and your business name, ie: " John Smith, from EB3D." Otherwise, he/she will think you’re a rep/salesman/freelancer looking for work and wasting their time.
    If he/she is not in, ask when would be a good time to phone, as he/she will propably never return your call.
    I have also at times not bothered to phone, instead just show up at the office and ask to see the person. Once you get to talk to them/him/her, act confident. Remember you are offering them a good service, which is to their advantage. Don’t sound like you’re asking/begging for a break, eventhough you actually are…

  4. Setup a good email, to be send to prospective clients. This should include a short resume (pdf), one or two low-res images. The written content of the email is also very important. It should be short and direct. Spend a couple of hours to compile this email, it could bring in good work.
    When sending your emails, make sure you don’t send one message to a hundred addresses at the same time. That looks like spam.
    Make sure the eamil is not more than 1mb in size. The smaller the better.

  5. If you don’t have experience, then create your own portfolio/showreel. Do one or two projects of your own.
    When I started, I did three projects for final year architectural students. I did the visualizations for their final year architectural projects at rediculously low fees - students don’t have money. The following year these students were working in architects’ offices. When their offices needed a visualizer, guess who they recommended?
    I also did one or two imaginary projects, which were added to my portfolio.

  6. Networking. The best form of marketing is networking. I have not done any marketing for many years now, and still get new clients, simply through word of mouth.
    However, you have to get into the market for that to happen. Often, you will find that you spoke to one guy, and he never uses you, however, he would recommend you to his friend or collegue.
    Sometimes, you may think that you wasted time speaking to someone, as you never got any work from them, but a year or more later suddenly he contacts you for work. That has happened more than once to me.
    The networking bit starts when you start marketing for work.

In short: act professional and use common sense. It is actually pretty simple.

actually, it would seem more professional if you set up your own website and hosted your videos/images there. i’ll also reiterate networking - it’s invaluable. :slight_smile:

Yes, yes and yes. Oh, and the networking ebow3d mentioned. Actually, you need to get into the mindset that you are networking 24/7. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell the people waiting in line with you at the bank or grocery store, tell your mechanic and your dentist. It gets easier with practice. When you set up the business, steer clear of things like Associates, or & Co, or Inc. unless you actually have associates working with you or are incorporated.

Offering classes to prospective clients can be a good way to network. Local community college extensions are always looking for new offerings for their catalogs. Or writing articles for trade publications.

I disagree with kkrawal that youtube, or any free service, is a good place for your portfolio. You have to “invest in yourself” first, which means actually spending money. Even if it’s just 50 bucks a year for a little starter website. Make sure you can upgrade it, though. You don’t want potential clients getting a “bandwidth exceeded, try again later” message when they come to look at your work.

Yes, stay away from youtube, myspace, etc. That’s nice for students, not for professionals. Any free host particularly with adverts is a no-no.
My domain name and hosting package costs me 5US$ per month. Not much of a capital outlay there. That gives me a web address with my business name and nice email address with it.
If you market on the www, make sure you keep track of who you’ve send emails to, so as to avoid being a spammer. Spend some time researching who to send emails to, its worth it.
If you get a reply via email, phone the guy and talk to him, personal contact is always better.

If you have to upload video, and don’t have the money right now to host them on a server. Please god, do not use youtube.

Use Vimeo. Way better quality compression, and most importantly, your work won’t be surrounded by stupid jokes and webcam videos. Vimeo mostly consist of professionnal work. and it’s free and without ads (I believe). But again, this is the “worst case” scenario. It’s always better if your stuff are set up on your personnal website.

As for myself, I totally agree with everything ebow3d said. Especially on the “start low” tip. Meaning, start doing job for people who needs it but don’t have much money. Since you’ll be offering your work for free (or very cheap) they’ll end up accepting you even tho you don’t have experience in the industry. And these people will build up your experience. When I started doing 3d a couple years ago, it’s exactly what I did. I did a bunch of images and short videos for a quantity of people who needed it for their little personnal projects. And, this is not an exageration, everyone of them called me back several months/years later to actually PAY me for a new project. And then, these people refered me to other people they knew, and before i knew it I had a bunch of contact.

This is what you need to work on. Build up a network of people who appreciate you.

Thank you all.

It seems I have my work cut out for me.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b75/madwriter1134/bowing.gif

dont fret Ropsta, ive done commissioned art for companies who were looking for simple stuff that needed to be done, networking is the simplest thing to get you on the right track,

but ,since nobody else really said it as simply

the first impression is your only impression ,
so keep some scrap of your portfolio with you always, you never know when you will be asked about your art by someone.

i was at a dumb party a friend of mine asked me to show up last min, had no idea the whole time i was being pitched by the host, so if i didnt have something to show there would have been a room of angry people :slight_smile: and it makes a great impression to be at least somewhat prepared for the unexpected

Re: video on your website: I don’t think there’s a problem with using an “outside” video host (and yes, youtube is crap for both visual quality and professionalism - vimeo is a tad better, esp if you use what they call HD (which isn’t really, but that’s another thing)) is okay if you embed in your pages to make it look integrated into your site’s design.

Re: having your reel/portfolio handy: They make CD-ROMs that are business card sized (maybe DVDs, too, I dunno.) that you can burn with your reel and have your business info printed on the other side. This might be a cheap DIY way to keep your work with you at all times, ready to hand out to prospects.

There are websites designed to get people who need work done together with people who can do the work. e.g. guru.com or elance.com. There are great possibilities here if you can build a solid rep, but they tend to get flooded with “junk” users. Anyone have thots on these?

I’ve done lots of work on rentacoder.com, if you go there and see, my profile name is “nt20”. It’s mostly been programming work though, no artwork yet. But I keep my eye out for those jobs. To date, over the last 4 years, I’ve made 5400 or close to 6000 or so dollars doing side jobs on rentacoder. It did start off slow of course, but as you get ratings and build a reputation sometimes you even get repeat customers.

-niko

I registered on Elance after seeing Mzungu’s message and am already working on my first project. I’d recommend it.

I registered on Elance back in December. I haven’t been selected for a single project yet.:frowning:

Which is strange because I’m sure I can’t be the worst candidate.

On another note,

The hosting package for my site is up in OCT/NOV. It was a real cheap one. Free, in fact. Do any of you guys have any suggestions as to a good hosting provider I should go with?

I’ve heard mixed options about godaddy. I don’t really know much about the others.

I’ve noticed on cgtalk people have both downloadable high quality videos and vimeo/youtube links. It wouldn’t hurt to offer both.

Also, try to find a copy of the “Graphic Artists Guild: Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidlines.”

It has pretty good info on the business side of art, plus contracts you can use.

Good suggestion, it might be helpful to me too.But i have never heard about Vimeo, I will chk it out.

Hmmmm, just thought of another question.

Referring to Vimeo and the likes, do I have all right to contents published on the site, or would I need to go throught some sort of registration?

You’ll find lots of recommendations by searching this forum, but I’ll suggest freehostia.com. Yes, they have a free-level offering w/ no ads that’s pretty good, but pay-levels, too. Combine this with an OSS CMS app and you’ll be good to go. Check out their (freehostia’s) Elefante automated script installing function. Pretty cool.

Another video host possibility is archive.org/ourmedia.org . They’re slow to upload to, but flexible as to size, type and qty.

As to copyright ownership on Vimeo, just read over their TOS very carefully.

I am actually looking for someone who can do some freelance work for a spec script I just completed for Universal (animation). I need someone to do a 3D character or 3 in a short amount of time. This is the type/style/quality I need: http://i36.tinypic.com/2d2hzlg.jpghttp://i37.tinypic.com/2mfemn8.jpg
I am willing to pay $100 per character completed to my specs.

-Charles Davidson
Screenwriter / Independent Producer