Film, TV, and Video production in general rely very heavily on trusted work networks. If you think about it from the hiring producer’s standpoint who is often also a freelancer, his ability to get work again are based on being able to deliver a product on budget and on time. Timelines are usually very short, budgets very tight, and there is zero room for someone to not work out. The first thing a hiring producer who got green lighted is going to do is look through all of his contacts and call everyone he knows who is usually busy on another project, then ask for references, so on and so forth. When they’ve built up their network of trustworthy crew, they will keep calling them back every time. Regular job boards like craigslist and mandy don’t work because they don’t tell them if the people that are applying are trustworthy and are only what producers will turn to as a last resort. We produced a funny video to show how this plays out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMlD488qZUs also on your home page.

We started https://productionbeast.com to help both freelancers and hiring producers overcome these challenges:

Freelancers:

Freelancers are often not very good at networking, and not very good at marketing themselves. Our goals on the freelancer side are to make it easy for freelancers to , market their work, and to stay top of mind to hiring producers and keep getting rehired. To address this, we build your work network for you, so that you are immediately connected and visible to others based on who you have worked with on the same projects. This way whenever you add credits, or update your availability, your network will be notified of what you’re up to and whether you’re available for work. Additionally, all freelancers on the site benefit from our heavy SEO investment, where we aim to drive searches for specific skills to freelancer profiles to help market them. And we don’t charge a dime for this.

Producers:

With the number of projects that producers run, they forget who they worked with on what projects even a month ago. Our network management tools allow them to maintain their contacts of go-to people, give them easy access to those freelancers’ current availability, and remind them on what projects they worked with. Whenever a freelancer that they’re tracking updates a credit or availability or any other important attribute we let them with what those people are doing to keep them top of mind. “Oh yeah, I worked with John on X-Factor, he’s a great editor that would be perfect for…”

So basically, in order to keep getting work, you have to 1) become part of a trusted network 2) market yourself and keep reminding your network of why you’re part of it in the first place.

Good luck with your hunt.