[00:00:00] Hey, real quick, if you've ever gotten value from this podcast, it would mean everything to me. If you could please leave a rating, it will help the show reach more creative entrepreneurs, just like you. And it might just change someone else's life. Just 10 seconds of your day to pay it forward and help another creative out.
Thank you. During this episode, I'm going to be talking a lot about the iPhone 15 pro, but that isn't the point of the episode. I don't care if you're using Apple products, Android, or whatever else is out there. The message here is that the barrier to entry has been dramatically lowered for creatives. The production of content has been democratized.
I'll be referring to the iPhone, since that's what most creatives are using these days, but please keep that in mind. We've seen the iPhone 15 pro change the game for creative freelancers, like photographers and videographers. The cameras on this thing are incredible. And the ability to record in pro res log is still blowing my mind.
The barrier to entry to earn money as a. Creative freelancer has been lowered. Some professionals are worried that kids with phones are going to [00:01:00] take their jobs and others are excited for the possibility of using a phone at a professional level. The reality is getting paid for content creation has been democratized and made accessible to anyone with a phone, some creative talent and some basic business skills.
My name is Chris Pieta and I run a production company and I teach creative business online. So what does the iPhone 15 Pro mean for freelancers like photographers and videographers? That's what I'm going to answer here today. Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale it to six figures.
Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. Let's just take a step back and see how far we've actually come with phone cameras and the industry in general. Just a few decades ago, it would have been unheard of for someone like me or you watching this to. To create an ad for a company, a music video for an artist, or even a feature film.
We're living in a wild time where you can buy the latest phone, invest some money in learning the business side [00:02:00] of freelancing, and then buy a few other pieces of gear, and at that point you'll have what it takes to run a creative agency, and that's absolutely insane. And this is only possible because of the internet.
Back in the day, there were very few big companies. The Coca Colas of the world were hiring big agencies and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a TV commercial. And this production would involve cameras that cost tens of thousands of dollars, huge studio spaces, hired actors, and so many moving parts.
And Coca Cola spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this would give them a positive ROI. They'd make money, but you or I could never produce this kind of commercial for them. The barrier to entry was really, really high. Only a select few directors got to do this thing. And they were behind a wall of agents negotiating on their behalf.
Fast forward to the rise of the internet and e commerce, and now anyone can start their own company. Someone can start their independent soda brand, create a Shopify store and run a successful business. The barrier to entry has been [00:03:00] lowered for this.
And with all these small companies popping up, the rise of small production studios and independent creators exploded as well. Creation has been democratized. This small soda brand doesn't need a hundred thousand dollar shoot like Coca Cola. They just need someone like me or you to do it. We don't need an agent to represent us.
We can land this client ourselves using the frameworks I teach on my YouTube channel and this podcast and my website in the show notes. And we're not filming or photographing on super expensive cameras either.
We're using professional and honestly consumer level cameras to do this. And now with the iPhone 15 pro bringing. 4k 60 pro res log into a phone while you can shoot a professional looking ad with just your phone. Over the past two decades, starting a business and becoming a freelancer has slowly started to become the norm.
At least that's how it feels among the creative community. What's happened has been incredible for us creatives. The creation process has become democratized. The internet has democratized business and content creation has really been affected by it.[00:04:00] When I say democratize, what I mean is that this career path has been made available to nearly everyone.
You don't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to go to school to learn photography or filmmaking or even business. You can buy an online course. It'll teach you everything you need. And most courses even have guarantees, which is crazy. This is disrupting the traditional educational model, but I'm getting off topic here.
This is a video about the iPhone 15 pro. What happens when everyone has the capability to create the best content out there? What happens when gear truly doesn't matter because everyone has the best gear? Now, this isn't the reality yet, but it will be in the future. Well, it's a similar thing that's been happening with the rise of AI.
We've seen AI all over the place from chat GPT to Photoshop's generative AI, and even the captions you see on social media videos. Short form videos on social media have drastically changed over just the past two years. Two years ago, the best videos on social had nice looking captions, and that's as far as their editing went.
But with the rise of [00:05:00] AI, everyone has access to these super fancy captions and animations because the AI apps just do it all for you. The barrier to entry here has been lowered.
So you might think everyone's content will just look the same. Everyone will have these pretty captions and the best people will look like the average people. But that's not what happened. What happened was that the threshold for what makes a good video was raised way up. Now everyone has access to this.
The best people in the space really had to go All out and make their stuff stand out. I've seen some incredible editing and some people short form videos because they're just being pushed to be better and better because everyone has a level playing field. There's a lot more competition. And when everyone has access to the best technology, the people with the highest skills, when.
Skills are the differentiator between people nowadays. When we're talking about shooting content with an iPhone, what skills come to mind? Well, Casey Neistat said it best. It's all about the story. Storytelling is what differentiates a good piece of content from a bad one. When everyone's videos have the same quality [00:06:00] because they're shot on the same cameras, then story and editing skills are what separate the good from the bad.
People are going to watch something because of the story. The emotional connection they get with the characters, the struggle that the characters go through, the resolution at the end, building up these skills is going to be so important. I've heard of photographers and videographers being scared that kids are going to come in, shoot great videos on their phones.
They're scared. They're going to get replaced and they should be, if they can't keep up with a new talent, the better skills of the other people, then they will be replaced. This is the reality and this should happen. Why would a client go with a worse service? Why would anyone choose to work with someone just because they have more experience when the results are going to be worse?
Whenever I see someone claiming 10 or 20 years of photography experience on their resume or saying that's the reason why they should win the client, that isn't compelling enough to me. These days, clients care about the results they get. They care about numbers. If someone has [00:07:00] 20 years of experience, but produces worse results than someone with two years of experience, why would anyone go with that 20 year veteran?
Now that's going to piss some people off, but that's the reality when companies are spending 10, 000 on a photo shoot, they want to get an ROI. From that, if the kid with two years of experience can provide a bigger ROI than the person with 20 years of experience, then it's a smart financial decision for the company to go with a person that will provide the higher ROI.
Now, demonstrating that ROI is a different story. You could watch all my business videos on that or enroll in my free workshop in the program, uh, in the show notes down below, demonstrating ROI is key to actually landing clients like this, but I'm getting off topic here. Let's get back to the core of what I'm discussing here.
Democratizing content with. With the new iPhone and new cameras in general.
So since everything is democratized, we need to be constantly learning new skills, hopping on new trends, and really making sure that we're the best option for the [00:08:00] client. Now this is where business skills are going to play a huge role in who gets to work with clients and who gets left behind. In the age of the internet, it's never been more important to actually learn the business skills to find clients, to convince them to work with you and to keep them coming back.
For more, if you can learn these three things I just mentioned, how to get clients, how to convince them to work with you and how to keep them coming back for more. You'll be fine, but you need to know these three core business skills. Now, at this point, it's normal to think that the reality I've described is so long ways away, but that's not true already.
We've seen a music video for a big name artist be filmed on the new iPhone. Olivia Rodrigo's video for get him back was filmed on an iPhone 15 pro. And that video looks amazing. You can really see the log footage shine in that video. There's so much flexibility in the edit and 99 percent of the people won't be able to tell what kind of camera this was filmed on.
And that's the point there's they're going to assume that it was some sort of professional camera that costs more than their car. But it was filmed on an [00:09:00] iPhone that they have in their pockets as well. Now you may be saying, okay, Chris, but that was a music video. What about a feature film? What about something Christopher Nolan would put on an IMAX screen?
Well, Nolan only shoots on film, so I don't expect him to start using an iPhone anytime soon. But recently a movie did come out that was shot on a camera. You and I can buy the movie. The creator was released in IMAX in 2023 and it was shot on the Sony FX three. For those that don't know, the Sony FX three is a compact camera that costs 4, 000 bucks.
Not cheap, but it's nowhere near the cost of a standard cinema camera that costs 50, 000 plus. This film being released in theaters after being shot on a 4, 000 camera is pretty insane to me. This lowers the barrier to entry for filmmaking, and this trend is going to continue. As technology gets better, the barrier to entry gets lowered.
As freelance photographers and videographers The important thing to develop here are skills that will differentiate you from everyone else. Business skills are timeless and everyone should learn them. [00:10:00] Learn sales, learn marketing, learn operations and customer experience. Then skills like storytelling are also very, very important for the creative side.
Clients are no longer going to be able to see a difference in the quality of the gear that you use. So you need to differentiate yourself with the results. You get them through the stories that you tell and you need the business skills to win those clients in the first place. Luckily, you can learn all those business skills in my free workshop in the show notes.
It's 60 minutes filled with the exact skills you need, and you can get instant access to that. If you sign up today, my name is Chris Pieta. Thank you so much for listening. And I'll catch you in the next one.
