Freelance Evaluation
Gathering Information
Before contacting any freelancers I thought it would be important to gain as much knowledge i could of the freelance industry so when I came to questioning freelancers I can allow my questions to flow more into a conversation. I wanted my questions to flow because I am formatting my interview into an magazine double page spread. I research the freelance world predominantly on YouTube and looking at examples of online portfolios. Contacting freelancers was an extremely interesting experience because I could kind of get an idea straight away as to the way these people work. The majority of the people I contacted replied very promptly within 24 hours, which just shows how organised and professional freelancers have to be. However I had one tricky request in that I wanted to meet the freelancer I was going to interview in person. This was because I wanted my answers to be in the form of a conversational style as I would be presenting my interview in the form of a magazine. I also wanted to dig deep into the freelancing industry to try and understand how one would survive in such a vast industry with huge amounts of competition. Luckily one person agreed to meet me, which I was fortunate in my case that he was a close friend and lived not far from where I did. If I could complete this task again I would allow more time to plan and contact freelancers. I found that a lot of freelancers that replied couldn't meet in person on short notice as a lot of freelancers travel for long periods of time particularly those working in the film industry. I would have also asked more questions about the freelancing industry when conducting my interview. Although the answers I got were very strong and in depth I would have allowed more time to go into specific areas of the industry rather than an general overview. I also would have changed my approach to presenting my interview. With more time I would have filmed an interview rather than recorded it using a microphone. This means that I would have been able to save more time and I wouldn't have to transfer each sentence, word for word, from a recording into text.
The Presentation
Creating my presentation was a challenge. I found this was because the answers I had gathered from the freelancer where very general key values of the freelancing world. This meant for a lot of specific information, I had to conduct my own research online. For my presentation I decided to keep the information on the slides as minimal as possible, and then I had prepared to talk more information so I was just using the presentation as a guide. In hindsight I found this worked very well in grasping the audience's attention and not bombarding them with too much information, however I found it being so minimal that I didn’t have enough content to reach the full 10 minutes as required in the brief. I also feel I could have added more visual elements to the presentation like graphs and images, so that it wasn't just all text. If I could have done my presentation again I would have interviewed more freelancers so I got more of an understanding of different areas of freelancing. I also would have spent more time focusing on the content of my presentation and the order in which I would be showing each slide in my case. In preparation to the presentation I would have created cards or a sheet with a script of what I would be going to say. I think this would have been easier to present and proven to be more professional in my approach.
The Summary
Freelancing is often seen as an incredibly complex world where only the elite will make ‘real’ money. This is not the case it's just a matter of how hard you work and how you market yourself just like in any other job. However, starting off as a freelance can be extremely difficult as most freelancers have had years of experience and gained a wide range of loyal clients over time.