#Director vs. poducer professional

There are many clients who aren’t aware of these differences in nomenclature, and who can blame them? They just want a video made, and maybe they don’t know much else except they know to look for a videographer, even if what they’re producing is a commercial or a featurette or a documentary. While that kind of line-in-the-sand attitude might be necessary for people who are building their career path and want potential employers to easily see what their skillsets are, it’s also damaging to the public perception of video production. Unfortunately in the process of distancing oneself from the constraints of a “videographer” definition, people who call themselves filmmakers also tend to condescend to jobs or clients that use the term videographer. So for someone who wants to explore their options in the filmmaking industry, it can make sense to call yourself a filmmaker rather than a videographer, even if you still only end up doing mostly weddings and corporate training videos. So to call oneself a filmmaker enables a person to take on jobs that are much wider in scope than simply camera operation.įilmmaking jobs can include story development and writing, pre-production and planning, a huge variety in types of shooting scenarios, creative post-production including sound design, and even marketing and distribution. The filmmaker doesn’t just document something, he or she creates a new something.

Someone who can make a video out of a mix of reality and fiction, interviews and voice over, representational and abstract symbolism, using a variety of moving images that aren’t tied to a specific day and time. Freelance Filmmaking JobsĪ filmmaker, however, is often perceived as a creator, or a creative, or a storyteller. Seems easy enough, right? You have an interest in video, you pick up a camera, market yourself as a videographer, and then get hired to take on a whole suite of videography jobs in your service area. The videographer is someone who documents with video. The videographer is often portrayed as a one-man-band who shoots events, such as weddings, performances, seminars, lectures, church services, and so on. One of the primary reasons that videographers and filmmakers identify themselves as one or the other is to market themselves to a particular area of video jobs.

#Director vs. poducer professional

And it stems from a deep belief in our professional identities being tied to the words we choose for ourselves, and the words the public chooses to call us. That article is intended to be helpful for both video creators and marketing clients, and we're glad to see it's been spread throughout the production industry, including on the ProductionHub blog.īut in researching video types and all the different ways we describe them, we also discovered that there are many misconceptions within the videography industry itself. Instead, the first conversation often steers towards discussion of budget and video duration, to describe what the client wants, rather than the video content and style. It's because there are hundreds of different types of videos, but not an easy cataloging system to describe what kind of video is called by what name.Īnd so, clients are intimidated and confused whenever they contact a videographer for the first time, because they can't easily say what kind of video they want, in a way that a filmmaker would understand right away. If you've seen our infographic and article on Video Production Services, you'll know that the general public has an intensely difficult time hiring video producers.