How Do You Handle a Difficult Client?

Every freelancer occasionally has to be deal with a difficult client. In fact, in happens all the time. Talk to any freelancer, especially after a few drinks, and they will gladly tell you stories to make your hair stand on end. Clients, even the good ones, drive everyone crazy. Tricky clients are so common that there are websites such as are clientsfromhell.net, dedicated entirely to horror stories written by freelancers about having to deal with hard-to-please clients. So, if you are starting off on your career, how do you handle a difficult client?

What is www.peopleperhour.com?

www.peopleperhour.com is a website that every freelancer should know about. Why? Because it's a way of finding and hiring skilled freelancers, people you may never have heard and have never worked with before. If you're doing a job for a client that involves stuff you can't deliver yourself - no problem. Find someone online who can do the work, and you still deliver the whole, completed job to the client. Equally, you can post your own skills online, bid on jobs, and start to build a successful portfolio career as a freelance digital artist by doing work for other people. What peopleperhour.com does it put freelancers and jobs together. So, if you're serious about building a career as a freelancer - it's a great place to start.

Steve Burch Reveals the Mysteries of Producing Animation

Animation Producer Steve Burch

Animation Producer Steve Burch visited Bucks recently to talk to our students about the business of producing animation. It was an excellent talk, well structured and clear, and offered an insight into the challenges of successfully bidding on, winning - and delivering - freelance animation jobs.

Many universities talk about employability; here at Bucks we are trying to deliver on that promise by preparing our students not just to be employees but also entrepreneurs, working from home and in small groups on their own projects, and perhaps - who knows - even building the next big animation studio in the UK.

After all, Blue Zoo was founded by a group of animation graduates fresh from university - why shouldn't our students do the same?

How do you start a small animation business?

Our new animation collaboration at Bucks

One of the most common questions asked by prospective students at our university open days is "how many of your graduates find work in the industry?". After all, it's all very well to train animators and digital artists to do excellent work, it's quite another to turn that knowledge into a successful career.

In media production of any kind, jobs for life are nowadays almost non-existent. Even highly successful artists tend to be freelancers of one kind or another. But there is another way of dealing with the perpetual uncertainty of finding paid work in the arts - and that is to start your own business. So how, exactly, might you go about doing that?

Jobs page at AWN - finding work in the animation industry

How animation graduates find work in the animation industry? There is no simple answer to this question. Jobs in the entertainment industry have always been highly competitive, and the supply of trained graduates competing for the best entry-level positions has never been greater. Official jobs postings, word of mouth, rumours in the pub, personal contacts, even cold-calling - all of these can be effective ways to find work in the business. One method is to sign up with the jobs page at awn - The Animation World Network.

The Freelancers' Survival Guide

If you work in the animation industry, the chances are that at some point you will be self-employed, either running your own small business or working as a freelancer. Even if you do land a good job as an employee of a company, most likely it will last at most a year or two, since jobs in our industry tend to be project-driven. Even well-established companies tend to expand and contract according to the size of their order book. So what’s an animator to do to stay afloat and pay the rent, let alone finance a mortgage and a family? The answer is, you have to be smart, and you must understand the rules of freelancing.

Student Showcase - the art of Sabah Masood

Sabah Masood is one of our many talented students here at Bucks, specialising in 3D modeling - with a focus on design and architectural visualisation. She is in her final graduation year, but she has already established a successful freelance career doing digital 3D modeling for clients such as Pinewood Studios and many others. We asked her about her work, and about how she managed to launch a freelance career at such an early stage.

Freelance artists and taxes - what you really need to know

Render unto Caesar what is due to Caesar

The tax code in the UK runs to 10,000 pages, and there is no human being who knows the whole code. But, every freelance artist needs to know at least the basics. Below is a short introduction to how the system works, from a self-employed artist's perspective. It is by no means complete, and it is no substitute for paying a qualified accountant to give you proper advice (which is highly recommended), but it should explain some of the basic rules of tax survival for freelancers, and get you pointed in the right direction.

Your First Client Project - 8 Rules to Ensure Success

OK, so you have got your first freelance job. You've pitched the idea, you've agreed a price for the job, the client is shiny-eyed with excitement about the amazing work you're going to do for them. Now all you have to do is deliver what you promised. What can possibly go wrong?  Plenty!

Below is our simple guide to getting it right and making sure that your first client is not only so happy that he or she comes back for more, but also tells everyone they know what a great job you did. Over the course of your media career, almost every job you get will come to you on the strength of a recommendation - it's how the business works.

How Do I Get My Name onto The IMDB? - How the System Works

Insert Your Name Here

The Internet Movie Database, or IMDB, is the principal portal for finding people who work in film and broadcast media. It's where you go to look people up. Gone are the days when you had to dig through back copies of Variety to find out someone's track record - knowledge is now just a click away. Being listed is important. Anyone who isn't listed, effectively does not exist.

But how do you get onto it? Specifically, as a recent graduate, trying to building yourself a reputation and an online presence, how do you get your name included in their database? Here's how the system works:

How Do I Get My Book Published? - Ten Rules to Make a Success of It

So you've got a great idea for a book - now you want to know - how do you get it published? The good news is, it has never been easier to get into print. The bad news is, the economics of publishing have never been worse. Plus, writing a whole book is going to be a major effort, so you don't want to waste your time on something that no-one wants to read. So what is answer? Like so many things in media, what you need is a good pitch. Below is our simple guide to getting it right and ensuring that a good publisher will (hopefully) pick up your first book.

What is a Portfolio Career?

We hear a lot about portfolio careers these days, as the old model of a job for life becomes something that fewer and fewer graduates can rely on. Outside of the public sector, it has virtually disappeared, replaced by a much looser and more fluid relationship between employee and employer.  But what is it, really? Is "Portfolio Career" just a fancy new way of saying freelancer? After all, freelancers have been around for years, haven't they?

Mike Swan on the challenges of a freelance career

Aston Martin by Mike Swan - final year project

Mike Swan is a recent graduate of the Animation, Games and Interactive Media course here at Bucks. He did some excellent work while a student at the University, studied hard, and left with a very strong portfolio, especially in the fields of digital modeling and architectural visualisation. We persuaded him to talk a little about what it takes for a graduate to build a successful career as a freelancer.