You want to work in the film industry badly. You send them e-mails without getting any response. If you do get a response, it leads nowhere.
You send out e-mails until it seems like the film industry is completely closed to new people.
This is totally, absolutely, not true. People are breaking into the film industry all of the time.
There are a lot of people sending out e-mails, only to get no response. The inboxes of professionals are full of e-mails from people like you.
If you send a bad e-mail, you can get blacklisted.
You don’t want that to happen. Getting on the blacklist means you won’t work at all. You might not ever find out that you were blacklisted.
You have to wonder, then, what the successful people did to stand apart from the multitudes.
The people who break in know another way.
The way you communicate in your e-mails has a lot to do with whether or not you are hearing back from those professionals. Writing to people in film is different than the typical business letters you know of.
Your e-mail needs to be less formal and more fun! :-)
Writing e-mails to break into the film industry is a bit of an art form. The mindset is different.
In the ordinary work world, you want to convey information in your e-mails. In the film industry, you’ll also convey information, but what truly matters is how you make people feel. Especially in the film industry, people remember you for how you make them feel.
When you watch the brief training here, you will notice the letter writer already has contact with the professional she’s writing to.
That’s important. The writer isn’t sending her letter cold. She already knew the person she wanted to contact.
The film industry is a people business, yet most dreamers send letters cold to the professionals they want to work with.
Stop and think. If you were a successful film professional, you would respond to letters from people you’ve already met. You wouldn’t need to answer the cyber pile of e-mails from people you don’t know.
Now you’re thinking. You are thinking about the other person, about their needs and the place they are coming from.
That film professional you want to speak to probably isn’t responding to unsolicited e-mails. They are out in the world, responding to people they have already met.
Professionals will respond to you because your emails will make them feel good about working with you. The best thing is, some of them will become your lifelong friends.
The film industry is a people business. It runs on relationships.
