How to make it as a VFX freelancer

Quite a few of you that I’ve spoken to recently are interested in making money from VFX, either as a primary job, or as a side hustle, so I want to delve into the business side of the industry a bit.

I’ll do this as a couple of blogs, so we can take the time to go a bit deeper.

If you have an incredible portfolio, it will make a difference to you landing work, of course. It’s just not everything. Professional VFX is such a team based endeavour, that professional portfolios can be misleading. Your work might look impressive, but that might be the work of the other 10-20 people who worked on it! There are 2 takeaways from this -

1- Doing small tasks for other creators, even as a favour, can go a long way, if you have faith that the end result will look good

2 - Since portfolio isn’t everything, don’t bottleneck yourself by saying “I’ll get my work great then look for work”. Do it now.

You can land jobs by meeting the right person at the right event, but you can get a much bigger reach by contacting people through contact pages or LinkedIn (yes, the VFX industry still uses LinkedIn). Just for the love of God, if you’re sending someone a message out of the blue, make it bespoke for them, not a clear copy/paste. If you’re ballsy enough, getting on the blower and calling companies directly can be a real win, too, as long as you don’t start annoying people

Whilst I always recommend (and teach) a generalist approach to VFX, if clients are looking to solve a problem, the recruiter will just want to tick a box. This can be extremely specific, such as “we’re looking for someone with experience using SpeedTree for environments”. Getting the learning edition and spending a full weekend getting to grips with the software could be enough to land you the gig.

Everything comes down to communication.Most people don’t communicate well, but most issues can be addressed by speaking to the right person. So be proactive in your communication, and stand out from the competition

Ok this one’s a tough one, but as a client, if you’re making excuses, you’re basically making your problems my problems, and I’m paying you to take problems away from me! If there’s a personal or professional issue that you hit, let me know how it’ll affect the quality or timescale of what you’re delivering, and any suggestions that you have to address the issue. That’s enough!

To remove pressure from the final delivery, you’ll want to set a bunch of milestones along the way (presentation of assets, first shot animated, lighting approval, etc). You can also tie payment to milestone delivery.

Estimating how long work will take is hard, partly because each task can be so unique. So practise bidding on your personal work. For every thing that you do, estimate how many days/hours you think it’ll be, and log them. See if you tend to overbid or underbid.

Doing a job as a buyout (you get paid a lump sum for delivery) can be a huge win if you’re able to do it efficiently, and if you can control the client. If you agree to a budget that’s 40 days, but you can deliver in 20, you’ve effectively doubled your day rate. However, buy outs are a risk, and tend to favour the client, especially if you don’t have any clause that limits the amount of changes that they can make.

Picking a price can be daunting, even when you have experience. Are you going to go too high and feel stupid? Are you going to leave a lot on the table? If you can gently push them to suggest the rate that they’d expect to pay, then everything becomes easier (they’ll suggest whatever is at the lowest end of their range, and you can probably negotiate up from there).

VFX artists get paid vastly different amounts depending on what they negotiate. Figuring out what you’re worth involves looking at yourself from the client’s point of view. How desperately do they need you? Do you have anything that your competition doesn’t? The answer may be that there’s a lot of competition, and you don’t bring much to the table. That describes all of us at the start of our career. Just means that you can’t ask for much in the way of compensation. Focus on your value proposition and keep that front and centre in negotiations, or find a way to use your VFX skills in an industry other than film and TV. That way you’ll have less competition, and intrinsically higher value (I once did digital sculptures for a fine artist, which he printed and cast in bronze. My day rate was about 10x higher than my VFX day rate, but my skill set was the same)

That’s all for now! Let me know if you have any questions, and if not, I’ll see you next week!