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It was something people should've seen coming a long time ago. So many folks moved to these larger cities, in part because of the amount of work there was, not realizing how oversaturated it'd quickly get. I know so many people who moved to Nashville, Atlanta, Portland, Austin, and other cities thinking they'd do great there. And at first they did pretty good. They were booked up solid doing music videos and social media content, among other things. But more and more "creatives" moved to these areas, and then businesses started taking social media content in-house, so jobs dried up. A lot of them ended up doing jobs they thought they'd left behind (weddings!), moved to another city (where the same thing happened), or moved back home. Video jobs will always exist, to some extent, it's just a matter of being in the right place and being willing to take jobs that you don't like/enjoy. Those folks who thought they'd moved on from having to film weddings might need to start doing jobs like that again. Maybe being the camera op for the local cable access channel filming school board meetings might be necessary. It's not glamorous or fun, but it's work. I never stopped doing jobs like that. $50 for two hours of work filming a school board meeting or a city council meeting isn't exciting, but it helps pay the bills. I live in a mobile home. It's bought and paid for. It's a nice one in a nice community. I pay a lot fee of $340 a month. Even if I had a mortgage it'd cost a lot less than an apartment even with the lot fee. It's not glamorous, but I own it and it's affordable living. From doing public access work alone my lot fee is paid for every month. Pre-covid I'd considered selling my mobile home and buying a house, since I was doing really good. I don't care about the stigma or prejudices people have towards mobile homes and their communities, but owning a house and property where I wasn't restricted by the mobile home park's rules appealed to me. At the end of the day though I decided against it because I was able to live comfortably. If I'd gone ahead with it though COVID would've killed me financially even worse than it did. I was able to weather it because of how cheaply I'm able to live. My work would need to take an huge hit before my lifestyle became unsustainable. Making this job work for you might require changing how you live and being willing to take jobs that are "below" you. It's a hard pill to swallow, since we all got into this because of our desire to create and be creative, but it's no different than everyone else who has a job that they dislike. I hope that makes sense haha

I’ve never really compared what I earn with anyone else or anything I do with what anyone else does, or charges for. In fact I don’t really know. Or care. I don’t mean to sound in any way flippant or pretentious, but I genuinely have little to no idea what anyone else is doing in my industry or who my ‘competitors’ are, but simply/instead ask am I hitting my own set numbers? If so…and I have more or less for 25 years now, then that is where my interest and time spent on that ends. If I broke it down, pro rata, per hour, I’d probably be on an ‘above average’ rate, but then factor in everything else from number of hours worked per annum to full-time employment perks and benefits, then pretty sure I would be ‘below average’. It’s all relative and yet irrelevant if the overall big picture of life vs income etc works for each of us as individuals. My neighbour have a Porsche parked on his drive, a 5 bed mansion and earn 250k a year…but he also works 80 hours a week and has no life other than working relentlessly to support that lifestyle. If that’s his choice, fair enough, but would not be and isn’t my choice!

And that is about the sum of it… A. How many competitors for your specific services are there? + B. How good/unique are you within your marketplace? = Being employed or not. Actually there is a C. which is how good are your business and marketing skills as they are as, if not more important?

I know it's bad to generalize but I want to open 2025 by doing so. What is happening in the video, happened ten years early in computing and more specifically in the web. Huge numbers of people have had access to devices and skills that were previously restricted to a few people. Let's call it democratization, that is, a downward availability of resources. A fundamentally good thing that has triggered processes of competition and lower prices for customers. But if we look at the issue from the point of view of those who have (or had) an IT company with employees or maybe even freelancers but not off the books, the issue also had negative effects: any pimply nerd from his bedroom would make you a website at bargain prices that you with your company would never be able to offer. You will say, yes but the quality suffers. Yes we agree. but how many customers appreciate it or are able to tell the difference? for every wise customer there are ten who rush to buy at the lowest price and who gives a shit if the results are crappy. Now, in my reasoning, replace computers with video cameras and software engineers with filmmakers. Does that make sense?

It’s a hypothetical(fictitious neighbourhood. I actually live at the end of a country lane with 2 other small cottages and no Porsches to be seen! 😉

Exactly this! I don't want to come off as though I am trashing my friends in the industry who complain or who had to move back home after moving to the big city with big dreams, but they all had the same things in common: leasing vehicles that were way too expensive, getting apartments that were too big (and expensive) for them, didn't want to take jobs that they didn't think they'd enjoy, constantly spending money (often on credit) to purchase new gear they didn't need, etc. Just unnecessary spending. They don't fully understand or appreciate the freedom this job can give them if they just changed their outlook. I too would love if every job I took was interesting and tickled my creativity, but if I'm pretty lucky being able live comfortably with low living costs and no real boss. I'll take it over office or labor work anytime!

Same here except we moved from a 4/5 bed farmhouse with a couple of acres, to a 2 bed cottage, because although I could live in a converted garden shed (or RV), MrsSMW would be less keen! Then we swapped the caravan/travel trailer for the motorhome/RV. The only thing that stops us using the RV more is 2 biggish dogs and a cat, but I can’t downsize those. Our car is also 15 years old this year. it does all we need, it’s quick, comfortable, capacious and relatively economical and has never stranded us and being 4WD on all season tires, got us to a few places in snow when with a normal car you’d be stuck. Such as a few weeks back when we arrived back from Paris on the train to the tiny village station 12 miles from our house and at least 8 inches of uncleared snow on the roads. Without 4WD and the all season tires, we’d have been f*cked! Otherwise oops, we have veered off topic slightly 😉 But back on topic…sort of…we choose to live how we do, which is not exactly as minimalist freaks in a cave, but have a balance of not having status: home, car, clothes, stuff etc partly because my chosen career doesn’t allow for it anyway, but mostly because we are not interested in it in the first place. I often get pissed off with parts of my job and then I remind myself I have no mortgage, no rent, no borrowing of any kind, everything is bought and paid for, low living costs, no early morning commutes, no arse of a boss to have to put up with 5 days a week etc… Folks have been complaining that the sky is falling in since forever and in some sectors, it is, because stuff evolves and it’s usually about being ahead of the curve to avoid the worst of it, if not all of it.

I don't think you're part of the problem, really. Like you said, if you weren't doing it there's a good chance it wouldn't be done at all. And the truth is, for a lot of work, "good enough" is just that: good enough. For better or worse, today you can show an average business owner something crappy put together using the AI in CapCut or whatever and their socks will be blown off. So doing something better than that, even if it's not something that you consider your best work or are even that proud of, is fine, at least in my eyes. The tiny house movement is kind of what inspired me, honestly. I could never live in one of those, too small, but a nice mobile home with 1200 square feet? That's enough to have a decent sized bedroom, an office for my video work/gear, and then a good sized living room and kitchen. I've always been someone that prizes function over everything else. My 15 year old vehicle? It ain't pretty but it does everything I need it to do and then some. Mobile home? I own it outright, have low property taxes, and it's more than a decent enough place to rest my head and work out of. These are things I value over everything. When you temper your expectations, re: where you live, what kind of house you live in, what kind of clothes you wear, what kind of car you drive, etc. you become less impacted by industry changes. We could all, as human beings, stand to be a lot more economical. Almost everything in my home is used, from my furniture (all of it except my bed, my one luxury) to my pots, silverware and dishes. It not only was cheap, but it helped create a lot less waste. Most of my clothes? Second hand when I can find things my size, except for my underwear and socks! So if next year another pandemic happens, I'm pretty much in a position where I can survive that without too much hardship financially. Kinda off topic I suppose, but I do think people would benefit from looking at things differently so that maybe you don't have to quit that dream job if you learn to live more economical. Living on a budget doesn't mean living in poverty!

Yep, I remember working at a production house that produced made for TV movies, it was at the time of transitioning from film to using HD for shooting (Mostly HD-Cam and DVCProHD videotape). They figured they could streamline all sorts of things and save time and money. They decided to not use a slate anymore. What happens was that, yes, you could now sync the audio with software (PluralEyes) and you could figure out which take it was by what order it was shot in, it took so much longer for the assistant editors to do all that work that it was much faster to just take 30 seconds before each take and use a slate. So, basically, the new technology helped a lot in lowering the cost of production but they had to scale back a bit for practical reasons. (They also tried to shorten the shooting schedule to 12 days for a feature. That proved to be too little time even with two cameras running and they went to 18 days.)

This sounds a bit like a short film that I recently helped shoot, but where I wasn't DP. The DP was solid, but the director seemed really inexperienced. I showed up a couple of times to shoot when the DP wasn't available and before we shot, I said "Ah, we should get the Tentacles connected to everything for timecode" and the director said to just shoot it. I asked about the slate and he said that we'd just clap for sync. "Alright, but the editor is really going to hate us, without a slate or timecode." Sure enough, I'm now being asked to pull a bunch of selects from hours of footage to send to the editor because they got overwhelmed and annoyed when presented with a mountain of non-timecode footage without a slate to identify which take, etc. It also didn't help that the footage for one scene had no camera audio due to my unforced technical error (we'd plugged someone else's Rode Wireless Go into the Ronin 4D during the previous scene and I'd toggled the left/right audio inputs to external vs the internal mic, I forgot to switch it back on the next day when we shot and didn't use the Wireless Go again). Anyway, at least now I hope that the director has learned that you will pay a lot more in editor time/goodwill later if you don't take the minimal time to hook up timecode and use a slate on set.

So it might not be ‘sexy’ but the average salary for a train driver in the UK is approx double my salary. And you get paid to go on strike whenever you feel like in order to petition for even more pay. Yup, that is the world we live in. It’s mostly been that way actually as in one where very few creatives actually make any real money and the financial benefit is usually in favour of having more regular employment.

Interesting post. I'm not familiar with him, but he's in my city (Portland, OR) and I ride the Max often. As a full-time freelance videographer for the past ten years, I just did my end of year accounting for 2024 and I can officially say that my income has been on a downward trajectory since the pandemic. Video production is just not considered a specialty skill anymore. 2023 was so bad that I almost threw in the towel. 2024 was better, but still barely a living -- probably around half of what my friends with office jobs made. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, I'm currently underperforming the average income for other videographers in my area by a wide margin, but I have to wonder about the accuracy of their numbers. A lot of my local colleagues have been exiting the industry just as Airview has. People with genuine talent. One trend I've been noticing in the past couple of years is that I'll show up with a car packed with lighting, multiple cameras, dolly track, etc. and yet some of my clients will often just tell me to hurry up and get the shot with no lighting or movement. And then we wrap early, which is nice. But overall, I feel like my work has been going downhill and this is really bothering me. And then there are discussions like this taking place on Reddit, so I know that I am not alone. Overall, I'm pretty discouraged and I need to figure out whether to ride it out or try something new.

Don't want to start 2025 with a negative post, but I saw this depressing new year resolution today: Nothing wrong with being a train operator, but we're at a point that being a train operator is a better career option than shooting pro video with RED cameras.