Freelance Video Editing: Build Strong Client Relationships | Ryan Kao | Skillshare
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Freelance Video Editing: Build Strong Client Relationships

teacher avatar Ryan Kao, Cinematographer, Video Editor

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:00

    • 2.

      Finding Clients and Winning the Bid

      5:40

    • 3.

      Managing Client Expectations

      4:23

    • 4.

      Getting Notes and Addressing Feedback

      7:25

    • 5.

      Getting Repeat Clients

      4:13

    • 6.

      Final Thoughts

      0:55

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About This Class

Learn how to book clients, navigate those relationships, and have them come back to work with you again by creating positive and professional client relationships. 

There are a lot of things Ryan Kao wishes he had known before starting his career as a freelance video editor and cinematographer. From learning editing essentials to finding his distinctive visual style to properly managing client projects and marketing himself on social media, developing skills like these have helped Ryan go on to secure opportunities with brands like Nike, Adidas, and IKEA as well as cultivate a community of almost 250K across YouTube and Instagram. 

Now, Ryan wants to share everything he’s learned about building strong and professional client relationships. In this class, you’ll discover how Ryan has found new clients, gotten hired, managed client expectations and feedback, and gotten repeat clients as a full-time freelance video editor. 

With Ryan by your side, you’ll:

  • Learn how to find clients through networking and word of mouth
  • Communicate with clients with confidence throughout the project
  • Interpret client feedback and address any notes
  • Get repeat clients by being transparent, flexible, and timely

Plus, Ryan will share a behind the scene’s look at notes and feedback he addressed on a project with Adidas. 

Whether you are just starting as a video editor or are a more seasoned editor looking to take your client communications to the next level, you’ll leave this class with everything Ryan wishes he knew about client communication and confidently handling a project from start to finish.  

Basic video editing knowledge and experience will be helpful when taking the class. Consider bringing paper and a pen to take notes as you watch. Learn more about video editing in Ryan’s full Learning Path.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Ryan Kao

Cinematographer, Video Editor

Teacher

Ryan Kao is a cinematographer and video editor based in Los Angeles. What started as a simple childhood hobby over 15 years ago has grown into a thriving and transformative career as a full-time freelancer in the video industry. With cinematography and post-production work ranging from commercial, documentary, and narrative pieces. He is proud to say that his work has taken him all over the world. Making and learning from mistakes along the way has allowed him to discover some unique perspectives and strategies over the years. He's also been so honored to share his knowledge and experiences on YouTube with an audience of over 200,000 subscribers. This creative community has fueled his career beyond anything he could ever imagine possible, and he's beyond excited to share even more with ... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Finding clients and navigating all of the challenges that come along with that, it's not easy. Once I got to the point where I felt confident in managing client relationships, it allowed me to feel more empowered in my creativity and the quality of work that I was able to deliver on those projects. My name is Ryan Kao. I'm a freelance video editor and cinematographer. You may have seen some of my work on YouTube, where I have a channel and community talking all about my journey as a freelancer in the video industry. You may have also seen some of my stuff on social media where I'm sharing behind the scenes and some of my client projects. As more recently, I've been stepping into the narrative space, doing some short films and even feature length documentary work. In today's class, we're going to learn all about how to book clients and navigate those relationships, from finding clients to managing their expectations, dealing with notes and feedback, and most importantly, getting repeat clients. I'm going to take you on a quick dive behind the scenes on one of my past client projects for a pretty big brand, and look over some of the notes and communications that I dealt with in order to get that project to the finish line. If you're somebody who has never worked with a client before, or you've been doing it for 10 years now, no matter if you're an editor or if you're in the video production industry at all, there's going to be something for you here today that will help you navigate your journey as a freelancer. By the end of this class, what I hope you're able to walk away with is an understanding of the client dynamic, and realizing that it's a lot simpler than it seems. I couldn't be more excited to share this class with you today, it's information that I think would have easily kickstarted my career in the very beginning had I had it. Let's dive in. 2. Finding Clients and Winning the Bid: Finding clients in the video editing industry is often a pretty random process and can come from sources you would least expect. Word of mouth, probably even more than you would realize. I'd be lying to you if I said that there was a simple rinse and repeat process for finding those clients. But here's a few ways that you can more consistently win the bid once you do. Finding clients as a video editor, it's a challenging process. More often than not, the hard truth is that the perfect client doesn't really exist. I believe that the moment you truly accept this, you stand to gain a valuable perspective that a lot of editors never realize. Every editing project is fundamentally like a puzzle, and it's up to you as the editor to determine the most creative and efficient way to solve that puzzle. In a lot of cases, the person who provided that project to you doesn't even know what that completed piece looks like. How can we show them that we have the skill set to be able to take on the project? How well can you take a batch of poorly captured or disorganized footage and turn it into something that actually tells a story? On some occasions, you might have a client who absolutely knows what that completed edit looks like. Does this mean that they're a perfect client? Well, no. This does remove one step out of the creative process for us as an editor, but it doesn't necessarily make our jobs any easier. How can we begin to find those ideal clients for our video editing? Well, it can start at the root, our portfolio. A great way to maximize the amount of client style or culture fits for your own particular work is to make sure that you're regularly keeping your portfolio up to date with the work that you want to be getting. Let's say you have two music videos in your portfolio, but you're not really interested in doing that work for your future or potential client projects. Then that's definitely not a great start to finding your ideal client. Just in the same way that a client needs you to edit their videos to represent them to their audience, you need to edit your portfolio for your audience. Therefore, your potential clients. Expanding and optimizing your portfolio in this way is such a powerful tool, and we covered a lot about this in another class. If you're interested, maybe go check that one out. The next step to think about here is that crafting a winning proposal and knowing how to communicate is a huge step to winning those bids. In freelance and contract relationships, more often than not, you're going to be reaching out to clients via email or remote. Sometimes you'll get the opportunity to get on phone calls or video chats. But being able to properly communicate and explain your creative process, to be able to listen actively and hear the client's needs, and articulate those in a way that makes them feel confident that you're able to deliver in the project expectations. Whether it's being able to break down your workflow stages and being able to accurately estimate time windows or being able to show and share references from your work, or even viewing references that the client sends you and providing your impressions. Simply just being confident and being able to be transparent about your rates and your pricing on a project. Clients love flexibility. You certainly shouldn't undervalue yourself, but it doesn't go unrecognized to be somebody who is going above and beyond and providing maybe a little bit more than what some of the other freelancers they're in contact with are offering. It really does make a big difference to be confident about how much you want to be paid for certain projects in your experience level and in your type of work. Seven years ago, some of my first paid editing jobs were making logs for other YouTubers. I think I was maybe making $100 for a 10 minute video that took me multiple days to edit. Fast forward to now where I'm at in my career and I'm working on brand campaigns that are airing globally for well over five figures. Using your understanding and your best judgment when you're working with new clients in proposing or crafting a bid or a response and really understanding that, hey, not everybody is going to have the most budget. Some might have more, so maybe you can push your rate a little bit better. Some might not have much money at all, but you really do value the brand and want to get that piece of work in your portfolio. Either way, knowing how to communicate effectively and confidently, it's going to go a long way for you as a freelance editor. Take time to understand the client's needs. Ask the right questions. If thing seems a little bit confusing to you, more questions are certainly going to be better than less. But make sure that those questions are insightful and show that you're committed to understanding the project and the client's needs. Lastly, be responsive and timely with your communication throughout the entire process. Now that we understand a little bit more on how to find clients and how to win that bid, let's move into how to actually manage their expectations once you're in a project. 3. Managing Client Expectations: Learning how to manage expectations with clients and especially how to deal with managing the difficult ones is such an important step in building a successful freelance career. Even though we've already talked a lot about it already, communication really is the first key here. It is the cornerstone to any successful freelance career, no matter the industry. Not every client will have as much technical understanding as you'd hope for. Being able to correctly articulate your words to match their experience level can go such a long way. Set realistic and clear expectations and ask more questions than less. It never hurts to over clarify a certain component of a project that might be a little bit confusing to understand for both parties. Providing consistent updates throughout your post production process is not only a good courtesy, but can help to inspire confidence in your client with the project you're working to deliver on. If you run into any roadblocks, communicating those and asking those questions and just simply avoiding any procrastination on communication, whether it's good or bad. This punctuality does not go unrecognized in this industry. A good starting place if you're trying to refine these communication skills is develop a clear roadmap. What does your post production process look like? Can you clearly explain all of the steps in your post production process? Being able to do this and communicate it to a client at the start of a project can not only help save so much time in the back and forth as you get going, but can also help convey a certain sense of professionalism to them. Also, it just acts as a nice checklist for yourself to keep your brain in order and maybe have a little bit less stress and anxiety as you get going. Consider, what is your first step in your editing process? Maybe it's finding music. You're a very musically driven person. If so, that should be one of the first things you communicate to your client as you start a new project. Whatever that is for you, identify that roadmap, and keep your process clean, trackable, and repeatable. Of course, we're not always going to have those perfect interactions, and knowing how to understand how to deal with managing difficult client expectations is equally as important here. A few things that you could do in a scenario like this is to make sure at the start of the project, the scope of work that either they provide you or you provide them thoroughly outlines without any discrepancies, expectations on timing, the rate, how many revisions they'll be receiving and just clearly what is and isn't included in your services. Maybe you have a client that's super picky with communication, and they're pinging you for updates multiple times throughout the day. Clearly having that roadmap available to them to reference in your original email or proposal can help to alleviate those scenarios. It may seem obvious, but making sure to clearly explain that if we go above the amount of expected revisions, that there will be a fee associated with those extra edits. Not every client is going to be fun to work with, some will probably be far from ideal and may even try to push you around a little bit. Setting boundaries early on and clearly sticking to your integrity in your process is something that you will absolutely need to adopt if you want to build a successful freelance career. Maybe consider what are some of your client caveats or project requirements or even boundaries when approaching a new project? If you have some, maybe share them in the project gallery for others to see. If you're somebody who hasn't really developed them yet, hopefully these can give you some ideas. Now that we've learned a bit more about managing client expectations and how to deal with some of those tough ones. Next up, let's talk about getting notes and addressing feedback. 4. Getting Notes and Addressing Feedback: Getting feedback in revisions is an unavoidable part of a freelance video editing process. It's this weird thing that we have as humans, even if a project is perfect, if it's something that somebody is paying you for or something that they're hiring you to do, they always are going to want to find some way to make it just a little bit better. Getting comfortable with hearing this feedback and not taking it personally, and figuring out ways that you can efficiently incorporate those revisions into your workflow will help you to build a sustainable freelance career. Revisions will probably look different for most projects you work on, but a process that I've adopted and have began trying to standardize across all of my client projects is three total rounds of revisions are included. To break this down a bit, the first version that I send to the client, the V1, is as close as I think I can get it to the original creative brief. From there, the notes and feedback that the client can give on this version can be a total overhaul if needed. But I always ask to make sure that they're as thorough as possible so that when we begin editing on the second version, by that delivery, will be pretty close to the home stretch. At that point, the third version of the edit is usually pretty much locked in and final. Anything beyond that third version of this edit may need to be discussed as extra editing cost. As we've discussed in previous lessons, clearly laying out your number of revisions in the original scope of the project not only help to save you a ton of headache, but can also possibly get you a little more money if you go beyond those revisions because the client's unsure of what they want. It's so important to be open and ready to receive these notes and feedback. But remember, you are the hired professional here, so you need to be honest with yourself about how you choose to respond to them. Clients are often passionate about the vision that they'll be hiring you to bring to life, and some requests you'll be given won't even be realistic. Hey, that's totally normal. It's your job as the expert to hear their feedback and hear their goals, and be able to explain what is realistic given the resources and the scope of work that was originally set forth. In those situations, provide alternative solutions that will help bring that project across the finish line without breaking deadlines or budget. If the client is persistent, you really do just need to be honest and communicate exactly what it is you would need as the editor in order to achieve what they're looking to do. I want to take you guys behind the scenes really quick on a cool project that I got to work on for Adidas about a year ago. This was a really interesting web series talk show in celebration of the Adidas Samba shoe. For this project, I was the cinematographer and also handled the post production. Adidas wanted to bring together three unique voices in the fashion in creative space to talk about some of their journeys in their creative careers. Kind of all focusing around the Adidas Samba sneaker. It was a super interesting and fun concept. There was a host interviewing each of these characters in front of a live audience, multiple cameras going. Definitely one of my favorite projects I've got to work on. What I want to show you guys here is a look into some of the revisions in communications I had with the director and the client in this post production process. These notes that I received from the director were for a version 2 of this edit, and some of them are very thorough with timestamps, things bolded to take note of, but also some were pretty vague and I definitely needed to ask some further questions. Right at the top here, he calls out to cut the fake super eight millimeter film. I did a film emulation overlay for a couple of the B-roll shots throughout the edit. Stylistically, I thought they were pretty cool, but of course, the client's needs and perspectives are more important than our own personal tastes. He also calls out logos need to be better, titles animated. These were a few specifics in the creative brief, but I actually did have a response to this, which I'll show you in a moment. As we dive further into the body of this email, we have a lot of very detailed story elements and changes to some of the interviews. This brief, looking at it from an outsider's perspective, looks like a lot, but this client was very thorough in how he communicated some of these changes that needed to happen. A lot of them were pretty realistic and not too difficult for me to manage. But there were a few, in particular, that I definitely wasn't able to deliver on. In my follow up email to this, in delivering the third version, I left a few editor's notes just to clarify some of the changes that I made and also addressing some of the things I wasn't able to handle. One high level note for feedback that he gave me, I took care of by adding a bit more spacing between each talents, responses as the host is asking the questions for the interview. We also added a few more story elements to help better illustrate one of the character's narrative things that they were trying to explain. But there was one note that I was definitely not able to handle, so I clearly explained that, unable to more clearly conclude Miso's authentic self story, due to the early parts of her interview being a bit timid and disjointed. On the surface, this might not make sense, but in the previous communication and understanding that I've given to the director and the client, and everything that we've outlined, this was an effective way for me to say, hey, I wasn't able to change this. Finally, I let him know that the talent titles and intros are still placeholders, because we were still waiting for the VFX to come back. That was initially discussed in the creative brief. The whole point in the takeaway that I hope you get from this is to simply make sure that you're thorough in interpreting the client's feedback, making sure you're asking questions if something doesn't make sense or it's not realistic, and clearly relaying the changes that you made to make sure that they understand, you heard and received those notes and if they have further notes to clarify on that, they might need to add extra revisions. An easy way to take some of the stress out of the revisions process as a video editor is to use tools like Frame.io, for instance, that offer you a way to send versions of your project to a client that can provide them with a way to time-code their comments on that video rather than having to condense everything into a big email. You may not realize it, but a lot of the cloud storage platforms that we've all been utilizing offer these video reviewing features. Great. Now, hopefully you guys are a bit more comfortable and more confident in understanding the feedback and revisions process with your projects. Next up, let's talk about how to start getting repeat clients. 5. Getting Repeat Clients: In a freelancing workflow, you're going to come across situations where you're working with new clients and on occasion you'll be able to work with repeat clients. This is something I absolutely think we should be really taking into consideration when developing a sustainable freelance career. For me personally, I would say on average, 2-3 of my projects on any given month are repeat clients. In terms of new clients reaching out to me for projects, that happens maybe once a month or even every other month. On the surface, that may seem a little discouraging, but a way I like to think about it is you don't need a lot of clients if you're able to deliver such a good result that they want to continuously work with you. In this lesson, I want to take you guys through a few tips and some principles that can help you to possibly get a few repeat clients in your rotation. The first tip, and I think that this one is an even bigger priority than creating the perfect edit for the client. Deliver on time or early every time. I know that sounds simple, don't show up to class late. But seriously, this is a quality of a freelancer that clients will fall in love with. When you're able to turn around work when you say it will be done or before, not only is this just going to keep the client happy, but it will help you stand out as a reliable business person that they can trust to work with. Going above and beyond will definitely get you noticed. Another way that we can implement this into our workflow and strategy is at the end of the project, maybe just delivering a couple of extra aspect ratios of the edit. Nowadays, clients are always wanting to post social content, so maybe exporting that horizontal video in vertical 9 by 16 is just one way you can make them appreciate your work a little bit more and maybe get that next project with them. The next tip here, focus on building long term relationships with your clients. When it's appropriate, feel free to reach back out with clients from older projects. Check in with them, and see what type of videos or content they're working on now. Maybe even share some of your recent work that you think they might find interest in. If you get the conversation up and going again, there may be an opportunity for you to offer some maintenance contract or even a retainer. When you complete a project with a client, if things went good, keep them in your circle. There's no reason you shouldn't maybe just touch base with them and ask them how was the experience working with you? What are some things that you could potentially improve on in the future? Finally, if the conversation leads there, and it feels appropriate, you could ask for a testimonial. At the very least, you could use this as a guide for your own growth in improving your business practices. But you might even get something that you would want to promote on your website or a LinkedIn of some sort. In the video production industry, there's a saying, you've probably heard it before, your network is your net worth. The fact of the matter is, you're not necessarily going to land every project that a client reaches out to you, or you reach out to a client for. The simple fact is that you just may not have been the right fit for their current needs. But how you choose to respond to this and carry yourself as a professional in this rejection process could determine whether or not they'll reach back out to you for their future needs. This entire process of finding new clients for our video editing is definitely one that has its ups and downs. But the simple and positive way to look at this, though, is you may only need to find that one client to sustain your career. If you have a client project that you were really excited about or something about that workflow surprised you in the process, share it in the project gallery. Maybe let us know a bit about what happened in that client project and how it transformed your workflow in some way. 6. Final Thoughts: This was an exciting one. It's definitely something I wish I had a little bit more of an understanding in the early phases of my freelance career; how to find those clients, how to win those bids and proposals, how to manage those expectations, dealing with notes and feedback; it's kind of intimidating, and probably the most important, how to get those clients coming back to you so you can generate a stable career. I'd love to hear if you've had a good client project and experience, and maybe a deliverable that you were really satisfied with the end result. Share them in the project gallery. Myself and I think some other students would be very curious to see what people are creating for their client projects. But I hope you guys learned something about managing clients and finding repeat clients in this class. I hope to see in the next one.