4 Ways To Land Your First Paid Birthday Party Videography Gig!

[the_ad id=”20″]Now, in our opinion, birthday videography gigs are a total nightmare and we tend to avoid them as best we can. There seems to be no middle ground when it comes to birthday gigs, it tends to either be based around young children screaming or older people extremely drunk, there just doesn’t seem to be anything in the middle.

That said, if you are an entry-level videographer trying to earn your first paid gig and build up your portfolio then birthday videography can be a much easier choice than things like wedding gigs. This is usually due to most experienced videographers who are established in your area probably want to avoid birthday work due to the reasons we explained above.

The four points we will be covering are not based around the standard, post your services on social media and hope for a bit but are based more towards targeting people who the people having their birthday celebrations will approach to save you some initial leg work.

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Offer Commissions To Local Bars

First up, we would recommend that you go to the popular bars, pubs, and nightclubs in your local area that have function rooms that the book out for events. Establishing a relationship with these bars, especially if you offer the manager a commission for pushing work your way can end up getting you a fair amount of work.

Although the legal drinking age is going to depend on where you live but in the age of social media, many people celebrating being able to drink will want a professionally recorded event so they can share the highlights on social media. This is where you and your service comes in and if you do a good job and have your own social media pages, you can often be tagged leading to potential future paid work too.

Work With An Established Videographer

Now, as we mentioned at the start of the article, many established videographers try to avoid birthday gigs but they are often offered them due to having a great reputation within your local area. Sometimes, you may be able to approach an established videographer, build a working relationship with them and have them bat the birthday work your way.

This can be a beneficial relationship for both people as you get some paid work while the videographer gets their commission and doesn’t have to do any birthday gigs. This can be much more likely to work during wedding season too as most videographers will take a paid wedding gig over a birthday gig and that time of year has the highest chances of videographers being books for both on the same day.

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Team Up With Birthday Planners

Another strategy is to team up with birthday planners in your local area although these are more popular in the larger cities like LA, New York, and London. It works in the same way that the partnership with the bar works, essentially, the person looking to celebrate a birthday goes to the birthday planner and the birthday planner pitches your videography services to them. If they do manage to get you a conversion then you pay the birthday planner a commission and everything works smoothly.

With the ever-increasing budgets of super sweet sixteenth parties and the like, this can actually become surprisingly lucrative and if you do a good job, attendees of the parties can sometimes approach you directly to cover their birthdays too. Its all about getting your foot in the door and trying to network if possible without the video footage that you can capture suffering.

Offer To Cover Video For An Established Photographer

Although more and more videographers are starting to work out that there are a surprisingly large amount of photographers who offer no videography services at all, this may still work for you. Essentially, it is based around you offering to provide the videography side of things while the photography focuses on the stills, the photographer can use his reputation to upsell the video services and take a fee from what you will be paid.

Wrapping It Up

That wraps our article up and as we said, we are not very experienced when it comes to birthday gigs as we prefer to avoid them but we hope that these 4 tips will help you secure some work in the future and help you get your videography business off the ground.