Tuesday 30 September 2008

How to Storyboard There is a vast opportunity for freelance illustrators


Storyboarding: A Market for Freelance Illustrators and Artists
This Guide Explains How Artists and Illustrators Can Make Storyboards for Money

By Ms. Nicole A., published Mar 02, 2007
Published Content: 548 Total Views: 701,792 Favorited By: 37 CPs

How to Storyboard There is a vast opportunity for freelance illustrators and fine artists who would like to make money by creating storyboards. Many companies use storyboards to produce commercials, television programs and movies. Storyboards are comprised of sketches and drawings that depict a particular scene in film and video productions. They are made in both black & white and in color. There are many books and places online where artists can find information on how to create a storyboard. However, storyboard creation becomes self-explanatory in little time. Illustrators and artists can create a storyboard for each scene or for special points in a movie or commercial. This will depend on the needs of the director and producer. Storyboards can be very fun to create. It is a great way to get paid for your drawing talent. Finding Clients Artists who want to draw storyboards can find clients in a variety of places. Where your work comes from will depend on how you approach each job. There are artist agencies that specialize in storyboards for television, advertising and film. Many of these agencies have built a good reputation in many industries. This makes it easier for artists to get storyboard assignments. Artist agencies usually require a portfolio prior to representing artists and adding them to their roster. The portfolio requirements can vary between agencies. It is best to find out what these requirements are before submitting any artwork. Illustrators and artists can also bypass working with a storyboard agency and find clients on their own. There are hundreds of movie production companies that are in need of storyboards.

Special Thank You
For Link: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/159745/storyboarding_a_market_for_freelance.html

Most of us go into freelancing to create a better life for ourselves and our families

Is Your Work/Life Balance Killing Your Chances Of Freelancing Success?

Lea Woodward

You left the company because you were fed up with the hours, right? You wanted more freedom, more time at home and you didn’t want anyone telling you what to do anymore…so you started freelancing.

And now you spend more hours in front of your computer, constantly think about work and whilst you see the kids or your other half more frequently, you don’t really see them or spend ‘quality time’ with them - you’re too busy keeping clients happy.

Ok, ok - not everyone is in this situation with their freelancing business but I bet some of you are; and the other scenario is that you’re the kind of freelancer who now loves what you do so much, it doesn’t feel like work. You get so absorbed in what you’re doing that time passes in a blur and before you know it, it’s gone midnight; the problem here is that you find it difficult to let go and focus on anything else because it’s your passion.

Investing time in yourself and your wellbeing is a vital strategy for successful freelancers - you are your business. If something happens to you that’s it, there’s usually no back up.

Take a look at yourself right now….

Is your health currently suffering? Perhaps not in a major way but maybe just small niggles that are occurring, problems that have never been problems before. Are your relationships with the people who matter most suffering? Is your business suffering from the lack of time you spend on ‘you’?

If so, here are 12 tips to claw back a good measure of balance between your freelancing life and your other life:

#1 Remember your mission

Most of us go into freelancing to create a better life for ourselves and our families - whatever “better” means. Remembering what your motivation was to begin with can help you get things back in perspective, even if money was the motivator. Surely that money wasn’t for money’s sake but to be able to do something more with it?…Remind yourself what your ‘better’ life is and re-define your priorities if necessary.

#2 Set your boundaries

If you work from home as a freelancer, then you’ll know how easy it can be to let your office stuff creep into the rest of the house or vice versa. Setting physical boundaries for your work can help create psychological boundaries between your home life and your work life.

Once you’ve set them, share them; the boundaries will only work if everyone else is aware of them and sticks to them.

#3 Plan specific activities

It’s easy to say “I’ll just take a bit more time off” or to try to schedule your downtime in your diary but often, unless you have a specific activity planned to do in your downtime, the work will creep into that time and you end up telling yourself “It’s not worth stopping now, I may as well carry on”. Planning specific activities to do in your downtime - especially with other people - is a great way to stick to it.

Usually your work will expand to fill any time you have, scheduling specific activities gives you a deadline hopefully making your more productive knowing you’re going to have to stop at a given time.

#4 Get hired help

If you find yourself bogged down by all the administrative and non-client tasks, then consider getting some help. You can use a virtual assistant or pay someone local to help. Whilst it might seem like an unnecessary expense that you can do yourself, there’s a great thing a mentor once said to me that I always remember: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.

It’s a question of resources; you, the freelancer, are the most important resource your business has. Doing tasks which drain and distract you from the business of making money, however necessary the tasks are, is a poor allocation of your resources. Outsource these tasks to free up more of your time for play or to allow you to concentrate on the core activities that make your business tick.

#5 Maximize your efficiency and productivity during your working hours

Each of us has our own favorite productivity or GTD system; it’s a great idea once in a while to review it and see if you can make yourself or your system even more efficient.

I recently realized (and admitted to myself) that I spend far too much time reading through my feeds (all in the name of research, you understand) and checking out all my stats (all in the name of tracking and measuring, of course) which take up far too much of the time I’ve scheduled to write on blogs. As a consequence, I often end up writing blog posts late in the evening when ideally (from a health perspective), I should be winding down.

Identifying your time-wasters and productivity-destroyers is the first step to addressing them - this tool might help.

#6 Say “No!”

Too many clients, multiple offers to work on exciting projects, a list as long as your arm of your own pet projects…there is always something a freelancer can be working on. Learn how to be more selective about what you do and say “no” to everything else.

After realising I had over 7 rather large projects on my plate, I re-assessed, decided what I thought would be most fun to work on and ruthlessly cut them down to 3. Traveling the world as I do, means I often have far more exciting things I could be doing with my time that working; which means that the projects I do take on had better be even more exciting and inspiring than shark diving, lazing on a beach or wine tasting in South Africa’s wine region!

#7 Don’t dwell

The psychological impact of freelancing often means you’re constantly thinking about your work. It becomes much more of a personal thing (”your baby”) that it can be hard to switch off - especially when things have gone wrong. As a freelancer, even when you’re not actually working you may catch yourself dwelling on a mistake you’ve made, a missed opportunity that’s passsed or the next big project coming up.

Don’t dwell, identify what your ‘off’ switch is and use it….frequently. Maybe it’s exercise, maybe it’s a drink with a friend (just the one, mind you!) - whatever it is that helps you turn off the thoughts about work, do it and stop dwelling.

#8 Define the values in your life

What are the key things that mean the most to you in life? What do you value? If you’re not sure how to answer this, then try it this way: what would you miss the most if it were gone? Your answers might include health, family, your partner, your kids, your money, your home, your business.

Now if you were to prioritize them, what would your list look like? How much time do you spend nurturing and paying attention to the top few things on your list? Is the way you spend your time currently balanced to reflect the main priorities on your list?

#9 Sort your processes out

Inefficient business processes - the bane of many a freelancer’s life but what to do? Check out this post to make a start. Creating a standardised approach to do the most common tasks in your business is not only a great way to cut down wasted time in your business, it’s also a way of laying the foundations for getting in some help.

#10 Schedule family time

Like scheduling specific activities to do in your downtime, scheduling specific family time and activities is a good way to set more boundaries and be accountable to your family. This doesn’t have to be complicated, even sitting down for your evening meal together is enough.

#11 Practice extreme self-care

Taking care of yourself as a freelancer should be one of your top priorities. You are the most important asset your business has and if anything happens to you, your business is screwed. Extreme self care is a life coaching term and it’s basically a way of ‘topping up your well’ on a regular basis and creating an environment that nurtures you and your soul.

Extreme self care can mean choosing to do something on a regular basis that you might usually consider a luxury or a treat (a massage, a facial, a poker night) or it can mean doing something on a daily basis that you know energizes, inspires and nurtures you like calling your best friend for a good old chin wag or taking 10 minutes out to just sit in the sun (or wrapped up enjoying the frosty air) every day. It’s about building an activity into your routine that regularly energizes and inspires you.

#12 Know the signs and symptoms - prioritize your health before you lose it

The life of a freelancer can be a particularly unhealthy one with irregular routines, challenging deadlines, demanding clients and a general lack of focus on your health.

As a former health coach and personal trainer, I realized that the reason most people don’t focus on their health is that you never fully appreciate it until it’s gone and you’re suffering. The question is, how much do you have to suffer and how many signs and symptoms does your body need to give you before you’ll listen and take action?

If you suffer from any of these symptoms, then it’s a sign your body is not a happy bunny and you should start focusing more on your health:

Fuzzy head and spacey feelings
Needing coffee to get you going every day
Cravings
Poor sleep
Niggling aches and pains
Constant headaches
Digestive problems
Unwanted weight gain or weight loss
It’s an age old battle - getting the balance in your work and life that creates the optimum experience for everyone.

These tips mean nothing if two things aren’t in place: your acknowledgment that you don’t currently have balance in your life and your desire to create it. Work on those first and then try out the above and let us know how you get on…

Special Thank You

For Credit Link : http://freelanceswitch.com/productivity/is-your-worklife-balance-killing-your-chances-of-freelancing-success/

A work-life balance is more than picking kids up from school

“I can’t believe it.” The floor started to slip away. Or perhaps it was just me, reaching out for the flat, cold lino-coated walls of the hallway as I heard the voice of the human resources manager at a prominent Melbourne gallery, telling me, not that I hadn’t got the job, but that my application had simply never arrived.

I had done everything right. I spent a few days on the application. I tailored my experience and chose my sentence structures to compel the reader into the firm belief - which I personally held - that I was their ideal gallery attendant and, what’s more, that the job was perfect for me. I could remember how, in a daze, I had found out about the job at all.

I was at work, permitting myself a dangerous, five-minute collision of worlds. I was sitting at my desk, with its teal coloured pinboard walls and piles of project contracts squaring me in, daydreaming, when I saw an ad for part-time gallery attendants on a website of an exhibition. In a secret corner where my dreams give off slight heat, being held, as they are, so close to my skin, I knew it was meant to be. (Although that heat might also be have been the hot water bottle I’ve taken to since I moved into my draughty apartment in Melbourne after making the big work-life change from professional public servant to wannabe video artist.)

Having done everything right, however, was not enough to overcome the dangers of entrusting my job application to e-mail. But it wasn’t so much the way in which technology had thwarted my chances at my ideal work-life balance that was causing me so much lino-slipping dizziness. It was that in the three seconds it took to read a job advertisement heading and picture myself in the life I always knew was meant to be, I had convinced myself this was possible. It was the loss of the dream of part-time work-life balance, the loss of the ideal.

In search of a positive in the entire experience (the lesson, “don’t rely on e-mail”, not being remotely adequate to give meaning to such devastation), I started thinking about what the real crux of my grief was. The news was not so personally shattering as finding out something terrible had happened to a member of my family. Nor was it as heinous as the 2006 Budget announcements to “help” the disabled and “boost” the economy with tax cuts for the wealthy. Yet, it had completely gutted me. Why?

The work-life balance is more than just a pragmatic approach to hours in the day: that’s why. I wanted that job because I thought it was the ideal part-time complement to my full-time studies. I had quit my public service job where I felt safe, smart, and well regarded - and hopelessly, terribly dead - and moved to Melbourne to study video art, where, tentatively, quietly, once every few months, I could call myself - just to myself - an artist. I could potentially keep supporting myself as a part-time public servant, as I had been doing for the last couple of months, and earn more than in the dream gallery job. Technically, this would satisfy the hours-in-the-day understanding of work-life balance. And I would have enough money and enough time to do the “life” stuff - the art.

But it still would not have been "enough."

A central problem in achieving a good work-life balance is that it is very hard to find part-time work that is fulfilling and rewarding in the same way that full-time work is. Bertrand Russell noted the centrality of meaningful work to happiness in his book The Conquest of Happiness, and philosophers and social scientists before and after him have all reached the same conclusion: meaningful work is a critical ingredient of feeling satisfied with life. The idea of the work-life balance is more than just getting the pieces of the puzzle to fit together. It’s what you tell yourself about the way it is meant to be. It is about the idea of yourself that makes you happy.

How then to find work which balances with life in more ways than simply providing enough money and time to live? I wanted that gallery job so badly because it would have done more than provided enough money and time to support my other pursuits. It would also have made me feel good about myself, the way that full-time work has, for hundreds of years, been recognised as central to making people feel good about themselves.

This is where the current public policies around work-life balance seem to miss the mark. In Australian policy-making there is a rather crude understanding of the work-life balance as simply providing enough childcare places and enough flexibility in work hours to allow parents to pick up school-age children and take them to football practice, or to care for an elderly relative at home. Work-life balance is achieved through family policy, employment policy, and aged-care policy. It’s not about helping people to achieve a sense of identity, or to ensure they are able to pursue creative endeavours alongside their jobs. It's not about encouraging people to take up yoga or visit their friends more. And it’s not about helping people make sure their jobs are making them happy.

I am inclined, these days, to try to operate as much as possible as if Australian politicians did not exist. Their policies rarely help me. I figure it is up to me, in the true, individualistic spirit of the times, to forget about politicians and to make sure that in my own life, I interpret work-life balance more broadly than my politicians do.

Some of us are lucky enough to have part-time work at all, as a first step towards a fulfilling work-life balance. (Despite my whingeing about how unfulfilled my part-time work makes me, I recognise how singularly blessed I am, in spite of my government’s narrow interpretation of work-life balance, to have flexible work hours - especially for reasons totally unrelated to having children or aged relatives.) The next step in making this work-life balance “work” is making sure that part-time work is still rewarding; still contributes to our sense of self - rather than detracts from it - and still fulfils its role as one of the key ingredients of happiness.

I didn’t get the dream gallery job. But it doesn't mean it's time to go back to working at a desk with teal coloured pinboard walls and piles of project contracts squaring me in either.

Special Thank You
For Link : http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3482

“I prefer to call it FREELANCE.”

This morning I woke up. Late. I had a cup of coffee. Late. I bought the paper. Late. Then I proceeded, with a minimum of effort, to do the largest part of nothing. I’m not lazy. Or retired. Having just wrapped up something of a whirlwind experience in my burgeoning film career (read, fulltime for the BRITDOC Film Festival – anyone who has worked for a festival will know exactly what I mean), I just now find myself in the precious position of being, well, to be blunt: unemployed.

Though, am I? It’s under the guise of holiday, but I wonder if I’ve just been tunnel-festival-vision for so long that perhaps I’ve forgotten what it’s like to live the regular creative dream, hopping from job to job, occasionally surviving on cardboard and mixed nuts, occasionally spending an entire week eating at Cha Cha Moon. This conflict led to a discussion with a friend (a burgeoning and successful filmmaker) in which she cried, “I prefer to call it FREELANCE.”

It’s not about the money. Nobody’s here for it (are they?), and I’m no stranger to the intermittent pay-check. I did the working actor thing, and I definitely will again. What fascinates me more is the euphemistic approach people take. There’s something so bleak surrounding the word ‘unemployed’, it’s a word that implies waiting – and if there’s any no-no in this industry it’s waiting – for the next thing to turn up in your lap. Being ‘freelance’ is just a way of owning your shit.

I just got back from chilling my kicks up in Edinburgh on a writing assignment for the international festival, and I think I might conduct an experiment on behalf of all those sprawled on the living room floor surrounded by the Positions Vacant sections and staving off their Hollyoaks cravings by gorging on Hula Hoops. For half of the next week, whenever anyone asks what I do my answer will be “Oh, me? I’m unemployed.” For the following half the answer will be: “I’m a freelance filmmaker/writer/actor/whichever other profession takes my fancy.” On the seventh day, results will be compiled, relayed, and dissected. Late in the day. Over a cup of coffee. And the paper. Stay tuned.

Special Thank You For Credit Link : http://www.stellarnetwork.com/wordpress/index.php/category/alexander-gandar/

I am by no means “rolling in dough” but I am certain we can negotiate something that will work for all parties involved.

I am looking for someone who has experience with php and lastly someone who has changed the look of the BuddyZone script and can make my look stand out.I need the script modified so that you can sign up as a musician, model, actor, writer, photographer, talent agent, filmmaker, etc. I also need the script modified so that users are able to upload and edit music from the site instead of having to use flash players; there are a few other minor changes but I will go over those when I select someone for the project. I am by no means “rolling in dough” but I am certain we can negotiate something that will work for all parties involved.

Credit Link : http://www.freelance-projects.info/php/buddy-zone-makeover-2/

Digital Filmmaking : The Nonstop Life of a Freelance Filmmaker


Digital Filmmaking
The Nonstop Life of a Freelance Filmmaker
September 24, 2008 The phone rang. Without even looking, I knew who it was."Urvi." I said answering the phone. "What's up?""A couple things. Are you busy?" "That depends..." "Good. Listen, the Pro-Teck people want to discuss deliverables and compression, so could you please get back to them ASAP? Also, I have a favor to ask.""I'll call Pro-Teck when I get off the phone with you. What's this favor you speak of?""CDIA wants you to write a blog about your life as a freelance editor."I took a sip of coffee. "Can you do it?" she asked.Good question, I thought. The fact is, I've been extremely busy since graduating from CDIA last September. Actually, wait a minute. Now that I think about it, I was already working as lead editor on a feature-length documentary a month or so before I finished Practicum. So in actuality, I was a working filmmaker before I was even shaking hands and enjoying the spanakopita at graduation.Is it feasible time-wise for me to write this blog? My to-do list this week includes: a reality show, a feature length doc, a short film and a music video to edit; a rough cut screening to attend; a class to teach; another doc to produce and a feature length script to co-write -- but besides all that, I have plenty of time. Wait, I almost forgot. I also have a relationship to maintain and two bands that I need to write and practice for. But besides that... Yes, plenty of free time."Sure," I said. "I can do it. No problem."I think that’s a motto all we freelance artists need to learn in our first few years out. I've lost count of how many times I've said that exact phrase or something very similar to a prospective job since graduating from CDIA. And that determination to take every job that comes down the pipeline and to keep learning has ensured that I'm constantly working and doing what I love.Sure, I don't sleep much, and I'm reasonably certain that all of the blood in my veins has been replaced with black coffee and cheap energy drinks, but I'm living the dream. I'm getting paid (much more than I ever did at previous jobs) to film live music, edit documentaries and features, color correct shorts and much more... Sometimes I feel like I'm cheating. That’s how much fun I'm having. So here I am. I spent the morning location scouting and doing tests for a short that I'm working on this weekend. Now I'm writing this blog on site at a client's office while Compressor whirs away in the background and with about two pots of coffee swimming around in my brain.
I wouldn't have it any other way.

Special Thank for Credit Link : http://www.cdiabu.com/blog/post/life-of-a-freelance-filmmaker.php