Constantine at work in Ethiopia

A Successful Grad Is Expanding His Video Business

Posted April 20, 2017

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3-4 years ago, Constantine Savvides had never touched a video camera.

He took one of our intensive 4-day video bootcamps.

Last week, we got an email from him.

I was a student of yours about three or four years ago.

I've sent 2 students to your program since my time with you. I must thank you as video now makes up about 90% of my income.

I've done docco style work for companies like Sony, Dreamworks, Activision, and Zynga. I have a good problem which is that my business is growing a bit too fast for just me. In the first two months of this year I traveled to 7 cities and it was bit exhausting. I've started to subcontract work and I'm looking for more professional videographers. My main bread and butter work is far far easier than anything we did in your class. Most of the time it's setting up a camera and pressing record. This to say, a character of professionalism is more important to me than talent. I was hoping I could somehow tap into your network of videographers to send them some work. Let me know if we can work something out.

So, first of all, if you would like to work for Constantine, please get in touch with him, or with us, and we will connect you.

We always like to hear success stories from our grads, so I wrote to Constantine and asked him for more details on his video work now.

"I did documentary work for the French Consulate in Iraq (Erbil). On that project, I really used quite a bit of your technique.

Other clients include: Viacom, Fox, and Columbia.

With the movie studios, I basically provide the visuals to support market research. Market research can be not the most entertaining thing. Sometimes I take 9 hours of footage and distill it into 5 minutes. I always keep in mind your emphasis on storytelling. It's about minimalism in entertaining in order not to lose the audience's attention. I do my best to keep them engaged throughout the length of the video. There's a fine balance to strike between entertainment and education. To the filmmakers and execs watching my videos, time is a precious commodity so I keep it as short and to the point as possible. There's a lot of talking heads (I know, a deadly sin in your book) but there' still ways to make it engaging. Unfortunately, most of what I shoot is sensitive information so it doesn't get to see the light of day."