Does Your Business Allow You Freedom To Take Smart Risks? w/ Abraham Joffe of Tales By Light

So many of us work primarily as corporate or wedding filmmakers - and love what we do - but have dreams of doing more. Of pursuing passion projects and making a living from them.

It can be hard to know where to start, however. How can we set up our businesses in a way that allows us to expand and grow beyond our current client base?

Abraham Joffe is an incredibly talented wildlife and travel filmmaker based in Sydney, Australia whose work you may have seen on a little network called Netflix with his show, Tales By Light. He’s traveled all over the world and filmed some of the most incredible cultures and creatures to be found on Earth. But Abraham didn’t start out this way.

In fact, he had an established wedding and corporate film business before he was presented with the opportunity to pursue something bigger. Today he shares with us how he had already set up his business to allow him the flexibility to take his chance and run with it when it came.

He also talks about how pursuing unpaid passion projects allowed him to gain skills and make connections that ultimately resulted with him traveling the world and filming exotic sights for a living.

What’s your dream film gig? What steps could you take to prepare yourself to take a smart risk on that dream when an opportunity presents itself?  

In this episode:

- How Abraham set himself and his business up to allow for smart risks
- How he took an opportunity presented to him, and then through his own initiative turned it into something way bigger for both himself, and his client
- Some of the practical benefits to having a series picked up by Netflix
- Tips to streamline your experience when traveling with a lot of gear
- Some of Abe’s most insane wildlife experiences!
 

Quotes:

“No matter how good you think you are, it’s just so hard to capture spontaneous moments. You’re trying to be cinematic, but when sh*t goes down it’s often the time that you don’t have the camera up, or you can’t have the camera up.” [10:04]

“I feel like every good thing I’ve ever done, in my personal life and my professional life has always taken a bit of a step into the unknown. I think if you're comfortable, you’ll just swim in the same pool forever.” [17:52]

“I think if I’d purely made financial decisions then I’d probably just still be doing weddings, and probably doing fine - I mean we were running a successful studio - but you know, I’m in a much happier place now, and I think you’ve got to give yourself those opportunities.” [28:32]

Links:

Untitled Filmworks  

Watch Tales By Light on Netflix  

In The Bush with Malcolm Douglas  

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