After dedicating over 10,000 hours to filmmaking and contributing to projects that have amassed over 45+ million views, here's a comprehensive summary of my learnings and experiences.

Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

How Much $$$ Should a Filmmaker Charge

Let’s say you already have a camera and some gear, got a business license, and a nice little reel put together. So how much should you charge for a video?

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

HOW TO SHOOT MUSIC VIDEO AT NIGHT

If you’re a solo filmmaker most of the time, like me, then shooting a music video at night could be a challenging thing to do especially when you’re working with small budgets. We have all watched hundreds of movies and TV shows that have made night scenes look stunning but also know that there’s probably at least pretty big crew working to light the scenes. But my focus for this video is filmmakers that want shoot night scenes for music videos but just need some tips and tricks on how to make their shots look better.

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

How To Shoot a Music Video on an iPhone

As a DP, I was given the task of shooting and lighting an entire performance music video with an iPhone 11. When I first read this on the brief, I almost had a panic attack because I got so worried that this was going to look horrible. I’ve worked on projects with iPhone footage in the past and it’s just incredibly difficult to color or tweak footage that comes out of it. But after this experience, I was convinced that it’s possible. I mean look at all the more recent Apple commercials that are entirely shot on the iPhone. They look really well done, granted those commercials are shot with commercial budgets not with music video budgets. It’s like comparing a great dane to a chihuahua.

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

3 Reasons Why You Should Start Making Shotlists

Having a shot list for your shoot is extremely important and crucial. It helps you save time, money, and gives you guidelines to work in during the shoot so you don’t get sidetracked from the objective of the shoot.

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

Premiere VS FCPX - 3 Reasons Why I Prefer Premiere

After about 3 years of editing on the FCPX, I was forced to edit in Premiere on this certain project because I had turn in the Premiere project files to the client I was working with. After editing a couple of projects on Premiere I discovered that I liked it better and stuck with it ever since. So here are 3 reasons why I edit my projects on Premiere Pro.

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

10 Money Saving Tips for Creatives

These are some ideas for you to consider when it comes to saving money! You may know some them, some of these are obvious, but hopefully some of them will be new to you so that you can save a little bit of extra cash, invest it, and hopefully it can lead to more financial freedom in your life.

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

How To Make Passive Income from Selling your footage!

Over the past five years of freelancing, I’ve gotten to shoot hundreds of projects equating to probably thousands of video clips. All of this footage has been stock piled into dozens of hard drives, and I finally had to do something with it. In this article I talk about how I’ve been making an extra $300/mo in passive income from selling stock footage.

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

Advice to My 18 Year Old Self

So I often get asked what advice I’d give my 18 year old self, so I thought I’d put it in written form. There’s definitely things I wish I had a grasp on when I was younger, things that could’ve helped me up my game. There’s over a thousand pieces of advice that I could cover such as not making people hold like buttons in photos but here’s the top five.

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

How I Bought My First Property at 22 Years Old

Hello everyone! So today I wanna talk about how I able to purchase my first house at 22, I did this while I was in college living at my parents house. I thought it’d be a good to talk about how to actually save up for your first downpayment and what lenders look for when you actually buy a property. So before I get into the aspects of saving of money for your first house, there’s a couple of steps that you gotta follow first. 

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Mika Matinazad Mika Matinazad

5 tips to Making Filmmaking your Full-time Job

Today I wanted to take sometime and talk about some tips of how you can make full-time living creating videos. This is a question that I always run into through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, emails and just through in person conversations. People are wanting to know how to fully take on filmmaking and make a good living supporting themselves and hopefully their family down the road.

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