While visiting Sydney earlier this year, I had a good long chat with Den Lennie about the challenges of building and sustaining your Production Company, as well as how to stay busy as a freelance or contract DP. We dive deep into how to structure contracts and payments to protect yourself (and your sub-contractors), as well as how to position yourself in what can be a very crowded market.

We also discuss some alternative reasons (besides the obvious ones) why you might want to take the time to create a DP reel or Production Company reel, and how to leverage that and your client relationships to get the type of work that you want to do. And we talk about doing work that isn’t exactly what you want to do, and how to handle that on a creatively-satisfying level. Watch below.