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| Photo courtesy of Vianca Maldonado |
Doug knows all of this and, after a few years of working corporate, he still wants to go freelance.
From an early age, Doug has had interested in film. He considered himself a “computer nerd” in high school and liked to work with digital video. In his junior year at Babylon High School, he took the opportunity to attend a video production course at a local BOCES campus. This course was a mixture of both film and TV production techniques and involved lots of hand-on work such as camera operation.
While taking this course he earned an internship at a local production company.
“I remember the first shoot they ever took me on,” he says. “It was stressful and there was money on the line and it was a long two days but it was so exciting! I knew from then on that film was what I wanted to do.”
Following the advice of his teachers, Doug attended NYIT Old Westbury after graduating high school in 2007. He admits that he should have done more research on the program, but Doug thought he was doing the right thing by saving money and staying local at a school that offered him a scholarship. It didn't take him long to see that he had made the wrong choice.
“I feel like in this industry, it's not so much the skills you have but the connections you make in school,” he explains. “At a commuter school like that, I barely made any friends in my department and I certainly didn't make any connections that would help me get production jobs. I felt like the other students weren't serious about their major and the teachers didn't really give us any motivation.”
Doug applied to the school of Visual Arts in New York City toward the end of his second year. Although he was accepted, the school offered him nothing financially, and so he was unable to attend. He finished out his bachelor's at NYIT, but felt that he hadn't really learned much from his college experience.
During his senior year, Doug worked as an editor at a wedding photography company. Although Doug didn't have much commercial experience, the owner took a chance on him. The company even worked around his college schedule for which Doug was incredibly grateful. He kept the job a year after his graduation, but he knew that New York City was where he was meant to be.
“Any better job would be in the city,” he says. “There's being a staff member on film productions, working freelance on whatever comes your way, or working at one of the broadcast companies. Whatever you do, it's all happening in the city.”
His chance came in the fall of 2012, when a Florida-based company hired Doug to work at their New York Office. This business was involved with streaming video all around the world. Doug's job was to to take the incoming video, convert it to web format and send it out to websites. He enjoyed his work for a time, as it took him back to his days as a teenager, playing around with digital-based video. However, after the other employees in the office were let go, Doug found his days incredibly lonely.
“They treated me very well, but I was working long hours totally alone and I still wasn't doing what I went to school for,” he says. “At this point, my goal became to get out and do what I wanted to do: work on productions in TV or film.”
Doug quit his job and went freelance. This is hard under normal circumstances, but because it had been so many years since college, Doug felt like he had to start over completely. He had very few connections and even less credits, but he was determined to follow his passion. Without his own equipment, jobs became extremely difficult to find.
“I feel like there's this ongoing debate in the film community right now,” he explains. “ A lot of people think they can buy their way into the industry with equipment and that convinces a lot of people that this is the norm and individuals should have all this expensive equipment. It raises expectations to an untenable level.”
Without a great deal of connections, Doug was forced to used websites as his main source of incoming jobs.
"I do have some equipment,” he says. “I've spent a few thousand on that equipment because of that very notion that people are expected to have something. I've tried to keep my expenses reasonable, and I wrestle with wanting avoid purchases because professionals shouldn't be buying most of their gear and buying stuff in the interest of acquiring gigs.”
He was able to working the production side for the video streaming company, and that gave him a foot in the door to the rest of the industry. He made enough money on these shoots to take more educational, albeit unpaid, work in hopes of climbing further up the ladder. At one of these shoots that he made a friend who connected him to one of his most important jobs yet.
“I got to work on an incredibly popular reality TV show,” he says. “This is a massive credit on my resume, because so many TV shows don't want you unless you already have TV experience.”
Doug has a few major future goals. He would love to be a camera operator and eventually a cinematographer, but he feels like he “hasn't even started because [he's] so far down the ladder.”
He also wants to start his own company that caters to commercial film interests. Recently, he has begun to approach several businesses in regard to their interest in online video advertising.
“If I can get this off the ground, I know it will be endless work,” he says with a laugh. “But it's something I would absolutely love to do.”
Finally, he wants to begin shooting personal projects, but he wants to go about it the right way.
“The industry doesn't have to be exploitative. If I do this, I'm going to pay my staff what they deserve. I'm not going to require them to have their own equipment, I'm going to feed them decent food and treat them like human beings. I'm finally getting my confidence back, getting the production itch, and it's incredibly exciting.”
Doug works part time streaming video for Major League Baseball, leaving his Saturdays completely free to work on productions. Although his path might not be the most conventional, he tackles the challenges he meets with spirit and resolution, ensuring his eventual success.
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