For my second case study I wanted to look at a range of different cinematographers and how they promote themselves, since music is my main focus area I am going to leave cinematographers who focus on music based projects for my next case study post. To start my research I wanted to see how easy it was to find the websites of any freelance cinematographers and also see which websites were at the top. I was expecting to find the websites for the big Hollywood cinematographers at the top of the page however a google search for freelance cinematographers returned a result where the top half of the first page was full of directory's that clearly cinematographers use to promote themselves. This lead me to start thinking that maybe websites aren't the most important piece of promotional material to freelance cinematographers. Once half way down the page I did start to find some websites and they all have a running theme of being quite simple with very few words only really the bare minimum text. I went through a number of websites and they all use collages of images of that cinematographers best work so it seems to be the general consensus that I need to look at focusing my website on the quality of my work rather than filling it with text. My websites at the moment has a moving image on loop and I may need to look at changing this for still images as that seems to look more professional based on the examples I have looked at. Other than that their websites in general seem to keep things simple with the headings usually breaking down the types of products they have made for example Adverts, short films etc. Then the only other section they usually have is a contact page which usually consists of a couple of direct ways to contact the person like email addresses and phone numbers. One other interesting thing I noticed was they don't seem to go out of their way to promote their social media accounts, they generally just have the links to their various social media account embedded into small icons for that social media at the bottom of their website. I find this kind of unexpected as I would have thought they would want to build a following and have people looking at their work on a regular basis but maybe they don't find social media the best way to promote themselves either. This lead me back to my original thought that maybe directories are the best place for freelance cinematographers and then their social media and websites just become platforms for people to view their portfolios on and this way of thinking is backed up by the fact that engagement with LinkedIn alone has increased by 50% over the last year (Hootsuite, 2020). The last thing I found is while I have been working to create a company name and build from that, actually most cinematographers just use their name with no logo or anything like that and this is something I am going to have to think about when buying the domain for my website. I am not sure at the moment weather a company name would attract people more or just my name.
Bibliography:
Danny Cooke - Freelance Filmmaker, Director & Editor (2020). Available at: http://www.dannycooke.co.uk/ (Accessed: 11 May 2020).
Laura Bellingham Cinematographer (2019). Available at: http://laurabellingham.com/ (Accessed: 11 May 2020).
20 LinkedIn Statistics That Matter to Marketers in 2020, Hootsuite Social Media Management. Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-statistics-business/ (Accessed: 11 May 2020).
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