Jon has been a freelance filmmaker and editor for over a decade, working across arts, heritage and tech. He loved what he did, but he wanted to galvanise his freelance practice, so he applied for MUTI’s Freelancing in the Creative Industries Skills Bootcamp. This is how nine weeks in a room with 15 other creative freelancers changed how he talks about his work and how he promotes his business.
Jon spent nine weeks training alongside a cohort of fellow creative freelancers, one day a week, led by his tutor Alice. Being in a room with people already living the same freelance life cut out most of the explaining most people outside that world need before you can even get to the real conversation.
We were already in the same position in some respects together, and we could kind of fast-track to the point where it’s like, these are the issues that we have, these are the things that we want to change about what we do, how do we do it?
Accountability ran through everything. Weekly check-ins on the tasks the group had set themselves the week before meant things that could easily have been pushed to the side actually got done, in way that was manageable and achievable, rather than overambitious.
A lot of the cohort had hit the bootcamp at a similar point: a quiet start to the year, and the pressure that comes with it. The bootcamp sessions became a place to talk about the lack of work, the pressure, and, for Jon, a session where he found himself further from “fine” than he expected to be.
It felt like a really powerful space for us to be in, to bring all of the things that we were probably a bit too scared to say to other people outside of it, and then actually work through it together.
Jon’s own practice has always run on word of mouth, something he’s grateful for, but which had left him without the habit of promoting his own work. The bootcamp’s early sessions with Alice put that to the test directly: pitching himself out loud, for the first time, to the people around the table.
It was actually learning how to look around the table, look people in the eye and say, ‘Hi, I’m Jon, this is what I do.’ and doing that in a really safe way where we could get it wrong, and that was beautiful.
Alongside the pitching, the group interrogated something harder to pin down: what they were actually offering clients, and whether that was the offer they wanted to be making. For Jon, that meant working out how to talk about himself in a way that was honest and accurate to who he wanted to be.
Goal-setting with the MUTI team gave Jon something concrete to work towards, both during the bootcamp and after it. He’d been putting off starting a Substack for a while. Talking it through, he realised it could combine two things he wanted: writing about who he is as a person, beyond the work itself, and doing it somewhere that didn’t require him to be on camera. The accountability built into the bootcamp was what finally got him to begin.
Unreservedly. Jon came into the bootcamp a decade into his freelance career, already happy in the work but sensing his practice had plateaued. He leaves it with a clearer sense of how to talk about himself, a project he’d been putting off for years now under way, and a broader creative network.
it’s made me more confident in who I am willing to approach, and it’s given me a network of people… It feels like I’ve got other people who’ve got my back.
Clare's really good at getting you to unravel everything and look a lot deeper into things."
MUTI's bootcamp created a workforce that’s more ambitious, proactive and collaborative, and that’s exactly what organisations like ours need to...
I didn’t want another long academic course. I wanted something that would help me understand the gaps in my knowledge...
