| Channeling Personal Work into Paid Commissions - Bringing Your Vision to the Marketplace

Use your personal work to spur commission opportunities.

What is the relationship between personal work and work for hire?  We’ll discuss how one can lead to the other and the importance of using your personal work to spur commission opportunities. Brandon will show examples of that through his own work and the works of his colleagues freelancing in the editorial and commercial sectors.  What is it like being a creative business owner, what are the challenges and benefits of steering your financial ship?

This class will have both field and classroom instruction. We’ll look at portfolio building and marketing efforts from social media to print and digital collateral. We’ll hear from members of the working community via Skype on the differences between agency representation and forming collectives and what collaborating with others can do for your creative process. Guest editors via Skype will offer insights into their own processes of choosing the right photographer for the job. What are the tools they use? What exactly are they looking for? If they can’t find you, then how do you find them?

You will take to the field and shoot feature assignments in the local communities, exploring the types of assignments one is likely to receive and the process of editing and delivering your files to the client while on deadline.  Each day will have time for critiquing the previous day’s work. We’ll examine sample layouts from prominent publications to see how images are utilized and what makes a compelling and engaging visual story in print and online.

This class is for the headstrong swimmer looking to dive into the marketplace.  Bring your printed portfolios, examples of your own marketing tools, your digital or film camera and a laptop for editing.  Be prepared to take notes and tell jokes, running a creative business is stressful enough there’s always room for adding a little fun into the mix.

All image credit ©Brandon Thibodeaux

Past student work (clockwise): Bjorn Rosenquist, Stinna Skrivergaard, Deb Dawson, Tiziana Rozzo