What I’ve been upto latley
I finished my last exam at the end of April. The last few months of school were spent contemplating what I’m going to do with my life. Unlike the rest of my peers who were a little bit more artsy-fartsy than me, I wasn’t going to grad school, or spending another year at school doing more studios to build a portfolio. I was done with school—I just wanted to work. I had spent the better part of the last two years working non-stop at The Medium as the resident slave photo editor, layout editor and web master and working on a bunch of other extra-curriculars—see Buff, Mindwaves, Steel Bananas. In other words, I had put school aside.
It made sense—and still does—to focus on extra-curriculars that made relevant sense to what I wanted to do after I graduated school to help me find a job than to make classes that didn’t really have much to do with my future a number one priority. Now that’s not to say I didn’t do well or make time for class. It was quite the opposite actually, doing so much helped me manage my time better, and staying in The Medium office for two years ’till all hours in the night helped to improve my writing from high 60s and low 70s to mid to high 80s.
So how does that translate to what I’m doing now? The experience and connections that I made while working my ass off for two years helped me get into freelancing less than a month after my last exam. Freelancing always sounded like such a daunting status—atleast for me anyways. It always made me nervous. It meant not having a steady job, not knowing what I was going to be doing in a few months. That’s the exciting part, I guess.
I started with a small photography gig, shooting a guerrilla marketing campaign for a large Canadian marketing company. They liked my work, and that turned into a second photography gig. That second photography gig resulted in a sit down in the office, where I managed to snag a contract doing all of their photography for the summer. What did this mean? I was to be hired on contract, meaning I would have to invoice, and by extension, start my own company.
So that’s where I am right now, in the process of cutting through all the government’s red-tape to start my own photography company. I’ve all but finished all the government-related paper work, I just have to get myself a website, and all that other fun promotional stuff that comes with a visual identity.
Expect big changes from me in the next little while. I think matthewfilipowich.ca might just become a full time blog, sans portfolio. We’ll see. Stay tuned, same matt time, same matt channel.
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