night crawling? as in night crawlers???!!! haha
um, ok so my advice may not be worth 2 cents because i've always done freelance work about 50/50 with a day job (luckily my day jobs are then specifically part time). this is so i have that something to fall back on when freelance stuff is slow (and vice versa) but here's what i can tell you from my experience: do one thing, get really good at it.
do you wanna make 150 bucks a day as a PA? can you get yourself on either 2-3 short films/month or 1 feature/month? that about does the trick for me, i don't need much more to pay rent, feed myself/cats, and buy beer. of course, you could also be a great AD, or art director, or focus puller. so narrative productions is one way to go. it's very intense, though, and projects can range from totally miserable to i-never-wanna-leave-fun. the miserable ones pay better, though
another, and maybe my personal favorite, PUBLIC ACCESS! not everywhere is fortunate to have the greatness that is public access, but i'm lucky enough to have worked at a few of my local stations. this is a fun job, low pressure, low stress (hs sports games, city council meetings=VERY low stress), and you're either creating helpful content for your immediate community, or your creating fun/goofy content with your immediate community. not to mention, you get to be a jack of all trades, shoot, boom, edit, all of it! downside being often low production values, so you don't get a TON of reel ready content, but it's a fun way to make part of a living (this is generally freelance, public access stations don't generally have large full time staff)
it sounds like what you want to do is create promotional content for local businesses, this is tough, this requires a vast professional social network covering all sorts of fields because i don't know how often local businesses have the opportunity, time, budget and clear reasons to seek out content creators unfortunately. so it's just better to know everybody haha but when these jobs come, they're fun things where you get to be, again, a jack of all trades, and in my experience, these businesses want fun videos, so you do get to be goofy with these, too.
um, what else is there...
-concert videography-get a tricaster, or just email around to concert specific companies. summer is great for this because festivals
-stock-very fun, i do some timelapse on the side, but there is all sorts of stock video and simple animation opportunity (learn AE really well)
-weddings-befriend partner with a wedding photographer or two, you'll help them expand their business offerings, and they'll help you because they're established. (i hate weddings, though, they fall under the miserable shoots in my book)
so yeah, i guess a lot depends on what sort of gear you have/access to, what your background is, what your passion is, but there are a lot of ways to work in specifically video, but yeah, if it's something you want to do full time, as a high level professional, i think it's important to really focus on one thing and hone that skill to entice audiences and clients because there are a lot of options for people when it comes to video production, so you really want to stand out. but there's a lot of fun ways to shoot video and get paid!
would love to see the reel and the site! best of luck to ya
