Tell us about yourself

My name is Jesubande Emmanuel, a 300-Level student of Computer Science, Redeemer’s University. By the grace of God, [I am] the CEO of a media firm – Goshen Media. Goshen Media offers media-related services, majorly Graphics Design and Videography – we shoot and edit videos. Though, by the grace of God, sooner or later, it’s going to expand into other aspects of media such as Photography. It’s beyond ‘just Jesubande’, it’s a brand that takes up different projects, we also do Branding and there is a lot more (such as Social Media Design) that we will offer when the company is fully developed. We’re in our early startup stage, but we are functioning.

What kind of projects have you worked on?

I’ve worked on Documentaries, Commercials, Short-Form Content, YouTube Videos, Interviews, *Talk-Ed Videos, Church Service highlights and things like that.

What role do you believe you fill perfectly based on the projects you’ve worked on, what do you add?

I feel that’s something almost all Videographers, VFX Artists, Motion [Graphics] Guys can do. We can take something that normally wasn’t so appealing, and make it appealing. That’s one thing Product Photography does, y’know, the moment you see the ice and everything, suddenly you want to drink [Pepsi]. We try to make things appeal to you so you want it, we don’t need to tell you that “Once you take [Milo], your brain will become 5x sharper” – once you see the way the [Milo] is pouring out like sand and then suddenly everything comes splashing – at that moment, you’d start salivating… you’d want it.

And I believe everybody has their own level of creativity, and nobody in this space is dull in that regard. Personally, I’d say I have fun when [I’m] shooting on site, but probably I can offer more value when I’m on the Post-Production team. Anywhere I am, by the grace of God, I can offer value, but I feel between directing – being on the camera, or being the editor, colorist or [being] on post-production in general are more of the roles I excel at. If you make me the sound guy, I may not offer much value there, even though I’m generally versatile, I understand little about sound.

What skills do you consider most useful to a Videographer or someone who wants to shoot videos for brands or as a career?

I’d probably classify the skills into two categories: Professional Skills and Relational Skills. Skills of the trade or profession, and then skills you need to relate with other people.

Professional Skills

Of course, the first reason why anybody would want to give you a job, maybe based on recommendation or anything, is because they have an idea of what you’re capable of doing. So, I’d say, like it’s said: if you want to be seen, when nobody is looking, work very well. Work so well that you’ll look at the time and be like “Whoa! I’ve really spent quite a lot of time here”.

Get skills. If you’re going into Videography, I recommend that you learn a lot, learn editing, learn what it takes to shoot, learn about different types of cameras, what are Mirrorless Cameras, what are DSLR Cameras – when best to use them, learn about lenses (zoom lenses, wide-angle lenses, prime lenses, etc.) and filters and what they’re used for. Learn Post-Production, learn what editing is, and learn Motion Design – I’d really advise that you learn Motion Graphics, it’s a skill that is really really in use now, especially for Short-Form Content.

Beyond that, work on projects. The truth is all the courses we pay for are useless if we don’t work on projects - there are many people I’ve spoken to and one of them told me “Carry your camera, go to events, and just shoot and edit later and upload for yourself”. No company would sue you for creating an ad for them. You can tag them, you might be lucky – they might even post you to their story or something. But even if they don’t, it does not change the fact that you did! You’re not in competition with anybody but yourself, you just want to improve and be better.

You can look at all this and ask yourself: “Okay. What kind of videos do I love shooting?” - because you can decide to niche down. You could decide that you want to be a Wedding Videographer – “Alright, they didn’t invite me to this wedding… but uh, the security is not going to kick me out”, plus when you carry your camera, they don’t know that you are not one of those paid to come shoot. So, you can just go there, shoot the congregation, shoot the bride… Hold on, I didn’t- I didn’t mean-

Edit it when you get back, add some music, some sound design, everything. Post it, and you can probably tag some content curators, they might repost you, and even if they don’t repost you, sooner or later, your own portfolio is building up. So, people don’t know that you probably didn’t have actual clients. In their own mind, you had a lot of clients, and they’re impressed. Most people like working with people that they know have been working for a while. In fact, while you’re learning, you’re already gathering experience. If you are asked for your ‘Years of Experience’, you won’t be lying when you mention X years.

Relational Skills

These are the skills that deal with your relation with other people. For instance, working with people who are short-tempered, working with people who are older. They’re some bosses that have never said a nice word to their employees or subordinates, some of them care about you to be honest, but that’s kinda just who they are. But the day you mistakenly relate with them with the same energy they give to you… well, that day you’re probably gonna lose your job and you’ll need to grab your CV.

For instance, I worked on a commercial at a bakery, and most of the people working there were elders – people way older than myself. And sometimes, I had to ask them to do things repeatedly because we were working with a single camera and I couldn’t capture multiple angles at once… and, the amount of “Please”, “Sorry” and such I had to use that day was a lot. Luckily for me, they were people from my tribe, so most of the time I wasn’t speaking English, the other people working with me were speaking English, but I was the one relating with them most so I had to ensure I was talking in a way that was very respectful, even if they were technically compelled to do what I asked. In this scenario, these people couldn’t say “I Quit”, but I still had to relate with them properly. Some day in the future, you never know where your favor may come from, that’s not the goal of being respectful, but it’s one of the advantages.

Personally, I feel you need excellence in your skill, with a touch of respect and honor for people – and you’re good to go.

Have you ever had a client who felt like they knew every aspect of what they wanted, but what they dictated to you felt counterintuitive or against what you felt was the best direction? How do you handle that?

Alright, let me [quickly] dive into my journey as a Graphic Designer, because what you just asked is something that I’ve experienced a lot in work as a Graphic Designer. Most times, what I tell such people in advance is “In my own opinion, this would not come out fine, but if you want it, I’ll do it”. I heard a statement from someone else concerning this challenge of designers which is “If we do exactly what you want us to do, it’s not going to enter our portfolio”, that is eventually what it leads to. So, once I do everything you want exactly: the fonts – I make them so large, the logo is so big, the color is popping as you want them to pop… Um, it’s not going to pop up on my portfolio.

To the client, if you feel this person is competent enough, you’ve seen this person’s work, you’ve gone through their page, you’ve seen what they can do, then just put your trust in this person – trust that they can deliver. If you have an idea of what you want or a sample, let the creative know, and let them put in their own creativity. Like, with the bakery I mentioned, the person who gave me the gig sent a sample of what she had in mind, and I had to tweak everything in the project to ensure that the finished product communicated the same emotion.

To the creatives, I’d say: “Let them cook”. Let them say what they want, and give them your own professional opinion. Let me talk about revisions a bit. When you’re having an agreement with [your client], let them know the amount of revisions you can offer. For me, once I start design, if the error is from my own end, an example being a typo from my end, it is not counted. If the client is out of revisions, and they ask for a change, they’ll pay more, we can’t keep going through some back-and-forth. But do not ever disrespect your client because of that, or tell them they’re not knowledgeable because of that, just leave them, “Let them cook”, and then don’t post it on your portfolio, if you need to charge them more, charge them more. Ensure you have it in your [written] agreement beforehand, specify the maximum amount of revisions clients are allowed. And [word of warning], please, as a creative, don’t ever accept the idea of “doing two samples” – it’s stress on the creative, and most of the time, you will not be able to use the second sample. Firstly, it’s been seen already, and you may never stumble upon another project that would go with the same theme or concept. So essentially, they’ve just wasted your time, and time is money – time is life.

As a creative, have a comprehensive discussion with your client. Know what the client wants, try to understand what the client wants. And always state your terms in advance, creatives are most times underrated – people who design, people who create videos, people who code and others – people just see us like individuals who just work behind a system and not do hard work or something. Do not underrate creatives.

Don’t fight with your clients, just understand them. Give them whatever they want, if they want it big and ugly, give it to them and collect your money.

What's the proper way to charge for my services?

Once you know your own value, you’d be able to fight some things. One of the issues I had as a creative while starting, and it’s not like I’ve totally overcome it, is charging people. The first set of clients I had were people I know, I went into people’s DMs a lot, because of something I learnt from my Church’s assistant pastor. He said “In business, there are always three stages. There’s a stage wherein you’ll do it for free, that stage can never be left out”. I’m not talking about stuff like a retail business, I mean you’re creating something. Say you created a drink, people need to taste it first before they understand that ‘Oh! This can be bought.’, so when they taste it they can recommend it to others. It’s the same with [creative work].

The truth is, irrespective of how gifted or skilled you are, you will suck at the beginning. Everybody sucks at the beginning. People may see that you have potential at the beginning, but later on, probably after you’ve trained for it, you’ll see that you weren’t doing the best things or the right things. Some of my first designs looked so beautiful to me, but later on, I realized that I violated so many principles of design and other things. So, the phase of working for free is when you’re starting out. It’s not necessarily when you suck, but it’s when you’re starting out.

Then, there’s a phase when you do it for friends. At this point, you do stuff for friends that will give an honest opinion. “Bro, you’re selling clothes right? Let me shoot for your brand, let me take pictures for your brand, let me start my Product Photography from your cargo pants and everything”, start from there. And [the length of this phase] depends on the individual, for some people, this phase could be a month (To be honest, it won’t).

Once you’re done with that, you get into the actual phase – which is the phase of charging for these services. In my own opinion, after you start charging, like a crescendo, you start growing gradually in terms of pricing. You won’t just start – nobody knows you or what you can do – and then you just want to do a [small video] for 500k, no one would want to patronize you for that. But there are some people who can charge 5 mil just for shooting and because of the name they’ve created for themselves, they will get paid. On the other hand, some guy just woke up and said “I shoot videos”, all right how much? “A 1-minute video is 500k”…. Okay.

In the long run, what will determine your pricing as a creative is the value you’re offering. So, there’s no specific pricing. I know this might not answer some people’s questions, you may still be looking to have an idea of a range, but the truth is – it is still the value you provide to people that will determine the price. You have to calculate everything together, “How long will it take me to do this?”, your time is going which means you are not going to be making money from other means at that moment, unless you have systems that are making money for you anyway, and that means you need to charge according to what you can do. So many platforms for freelancing have their charging per hour, 5$ per hour, 20$ per hour and so on. Think of it, “If I’m going to shoot and edit this, how long will it take me?”, then “How good am I? Will what I do help this person make sales?” and questions like that. The value you offer will determine your pricing.

[On Rate Cards]

Every creative should have a rate card. You’re a videographer, graphic designer, voice-over artist, have a rate card. It can be flexible, in fact, I learnt something recently and I’m working on it myself. Someone said he has two different rate cards – two categories – one for the regular clients and one for the premium clients, he will assess you before giving you. For instance, I would be depriving myself if someone like Elon Musk or Bill Gates asks how much I would charge him for a [job] and I tell him my regular rate of 7k, something I’d charge you – that’s like taking a cup of water out of an ocean. You’re not extorting them, if they can’t afford it, they’ll go somewhere else where they can get the value they can pay for.

And truth be told, those that will stress you the most are those that pay less. I’ll give you a common example; Every editor knows that the bedrock of their edit is the music, most times you’d want to beat-sync it. So, imagine after sending one powerful edit you’ve color-graded, [you’ve] done sound design and everything, you send it to the person and the person says “Change the Music”. You’re actually starting the edit all over again because the music is the thing. In contrast, most premium clients already know what you can do before they gave you the job.

So have a Rate Card. My rate card for branding, for instance, has four categories: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond. Each category has what it comes with, so clients go with whichever one they can afford.

[Important Legal Stuff]

One thing that is very important, especially when you’re working on a project that’s more like a contract or has a duration, always have an agreement – not a verbal agreement – a documented [written] agreement that contains both of your signatures. Always collect an upfront payment. And before you deliver the job totally, always ensure that you have your balance.

Another thing to think about is Copyright. Under normal circumstances, a creative holds the copyright to his work. The only situation where the copyright does not belong to the creative is if you’re under employment [or if there is a written contract that defines your work as ‘Work for Hire’]. If you’re a freelancer or an agency, you own the copyright to your work, but you must state in the agreement that you have the right to use your work for promotional purposes. Otherwise, they might see the work on your portfolio and sue you… and get their money back, off something you did. But when you have an agreement that “Everything we do here, we own it, but we’re giving it to you for this and this purpose”.

Someone opened my eyes to this because, as a creative, you also need to be intelligent in terms of business. What he said was: “In an agreement, you state the purpose of the job”. For instance, you’re [shooting a promotional video for a shoe company], and the agreement is that the work is for social media purposes. If I see my video on TV, I can sue you – you didn’t pay for that. The money from the lawsuit is more than what they would have just paid you in the first place. So, as creatives, let us not be slapped on the face [pushovers] please. As long as you’re using you’re intellect, it is a creative job.

What’s your workflow like? Any ways you feel you can improve?

To be honest, I don’t often follow the conventional thing, which is kind of like a bad habit for me. Assume I was contacted for a job, Step 1 - after deciding on pricing and everything, and we already have the job – what I do is I try to go online, because in the world of today, there is literally no new idea, everybody is just copying each other and refining it, we’re working based on principles other people have already created. I try to check online – portfolios, YouTube, etc. – for ideas on what I’m working on. After that, I try to list out the shots I want to have, this is something that sometimes I don’t really do, sometimes I just have it in my mind that I’ll take regular shots and maybe I just have this concept. But other times I actually list them out, and sometimes with the help of A.I. try to get ideas for that.

One area I feel I could improve is something called Storyboarding. Storyboarding is basically you having a pictorial representation of what exactly you want to do. So, like, you have a production, this is the number of cameras I’m providing, this is the exact placement of that and all. Personally, I’m that not good with Storyboarding yet, I hardly do that. Max I’ve done is listing out the angles and scenes I intend to do in that regard. One of the things that helps with this is um – it’s said that the ‘faintest pen is better than the sharpest brain’ – it helps you remember some things rather than you looking back in the post-production phase and discovering “Oh my God, we missed something”.

Afterwards, I go for the actual shoot. Most of the time, videos take a lot of time, like the bakery documentary, I didn’t know it was going to take so long, but I think it took about 6 hours. One of the reasons for that was, at some point we had to wait for the bread to swell, at other points we had to wait for them to make another batch because we wanted to see them slicing, so that took some time. Then afterwards, it’s time to sort files, and that can be done while shooting. But in my case, recently I started organizing my stuff into folders immediately I shoot them, but previously, I just airdrop everything to my PC and then afterwards sort them out, I sort out the A-Rolls and B-Rolls in a folder, then import them into the editing software and start working.

A-Rolls are basically the main video, while B-Rolls are basically extra shots, for example, maybe the person talking is an athlete, a clip of the fellow running would be a B-Roll.

There’s one phase that I could probably just add to post-production, that is the creation of proxies. That helps people that are using devices that are not so high-end, it helps them get a lower resolution display on their monitor, but when they export, they’ll get the normal maximum quality.

Afterwards, in post-production majorly, importation of files, cutting, adding of text, transitions, sound design – a lot of times, [amongst] the sound you actually hear in videos, some of them were not there, especially the extra sounds. I mean, a person talking – the isolated voice is from the video most of the time, but I’ve even had situations that the audio wasn’t good and the fellow had to record separately, looking at the video, and then we had to just add it all together so that the audio would be much better. Most of the time, I do sound design while editing because that’s when I’ll hear what I have to do, for instance, maybe squeezing a nylon. Okay, get my microphone, squeeze and all that. Then-

[Wait, the squeezing of a nylon, you use that to make some kind of special sound effect?]

Yeah. Basically, Sound Design is just everything you hear. For instance, if you’re watching a movie, and they’re in a market square and then there’s a lot of people shouting and everything, I can tell you 99% of the time it was not in that actual market that that sound was made. Even if it was, it wasn’t when they were recording, they most likely took the microphone to just record the ambience. That’s why, if you check an editor’s timeline, you’d see a lot of audio layers. There’s this video of a man in a restaurant, and both the plates clanging, the forks hitting the plates, the chatter of the customers, everything – they were all recorded separately. That’s part of the job, we do that. Sometimes, you even seeing daylight… it might actually not be daylight, it might just be some sort of LED light outside the window. That’s the life of a filmmaker, it’s basically you creating the world.

Then afterwards, there’s Color Correction, there’s Color Grading. Color Correction basically is just adjusting the video to a standard look, but a Color Grade makes [the video] have a specific kind of look. Colors show the mood of a video, when it’s pretty warm – like yellowish or something, that can show that it’s a happy mood. When it’s pretty cool – like bluish, that can show something moody going on there.

After doing that, it’s exportation, delivery, go and flex. [Don’t forget to go and flex]

What project are you most proud of? Mind sharing what went into it?

There’s this syndrome I guess most creatives have including myself, and that’s getting cringed at previous jobs after you’re done. Like, there’s a video I shot when I wasn’t into videos back then. I watched it recently and… nah.

Most external shoots I’ve worked on I’ve been proud of. But one that really comes to mind, probably because of all the work I put into it, was… it’s hard to categorize but it’s basically for some students who had a project – it was to show the process of making bread, but at the same time, trying to get people to buy the bread. So, it’s like contrasting between a Documentary and a Commercial, and that was challenging on its own because I kept on asking “Sorry, are we trying to make a commercial or a documentary?”. But then, God helping me, we were able to figure something out and it all came out well. My PC really suffered for this one; I had to sort a lot of 4K footage, which wasn’t arranged at the time. Still, I feel that job was really cool.

About what the process was like, majorly I’ve already described the workflow. In fact, this project was more like my case study in that workflow except for the fact that for this one, I’d say I didn’t really come from the filmmaker perspective. I almost didn’t jot anything down; it was while shooting that I thought of using Frame Block Transitions (that is, going through a barrier then transitioning from one shot to another, using maybe a wall) and other stuff.

I tried to get people’s reviews without letting them know that it’s me, I was trying to get honest opinions because people didn’t know I was the one that shot it until someone posted it first and tagged me, and then I posted it myself.

One thing I can say I’ve been proud of, by God’s grace, about myself is not waiting for the ‘big’ gadgets before getting to work. I make content online, I have a YouTube Channel that’s pretty much in its beginning days, and an Instagram – they’re all in their beginning days really. But success isn’t measured by the number of followers or engagement, it’s measured by how much you are creating, and I think I’ve created a lot. And the one thing I’ve not done, at least since I heard people speak about it, is waiting for the right equipment. I always try my best to create the equipment. Normally, for you to have a standard Talking Ed video, you need a couple of professional lights, RGB lights, you need soft boxes, probably a quality shotgun mic or a professional lapel mic or something. But we tend to work with whatever is available.

For the colored lighting, when I checked online, I saw they weren’t budget friendly… Okay, so I got lamps, and placed colored nylons over them. I have a collection of colored nylons, so I use them [the lamps] as fill lights, back lights, practical lights and stuff like that. When you watch the video, you just see the lighting and be like “Oh my God, this is nice!”. People have asked me “Oh what light are you using?”, and I respond “Oh sorry brother, I’m using a very nice reading lamp and colored nylons”. That’s one thing, people tend to wait for that big gadget before they start cooking. My brother, you don’t need too much, start with what you have.