Transcript:

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Callum Morrison, I’m a photographer and film producer.

How did you get into the creative industries?

I got into the creative industry by… Well, I knew I wanted to take photos, which is how I started, and I reached out to local businesses and
pitched to them and said, “Look, I’d like to start,” and then from there it sort of just grew, really.

A lot of portraiture photography, event photography, and putting together a lot of film productions in the music industry.

So live shows specifically, so we’ll be filming live shows for artists and either putting that out on pay-per-view or things along those lines.

I’m usually sort of the logistics side of it, because finance is usually sorted, so the music label, we usually have the funding for it, whereas in film you’ll have to go and source that, which is something I’d like to be doing in the future.

But my role, yeah, is more logistics based, so the crew sourcing them, seeing how many people will need food, all that location, that sort of stuff.

I don’t really think there’s anything like being on set. I think the first time I was on one was when I was like, “I want to do this.”

I get a massive kick out of being, about doing what I do, I love it.

The best experience I’ve had was I was fortunate enough to photograph Jonathan Ross’s Halloween party, and so I got to meet loads of my heroes,
got to meet Edgar Wright and people like that, so I was just in the clouds the whole time, just being all giddy. I didn’t quite realise who people were, because they were dressed up, and then afterwards I was like, “Blood Hell, that was Hans Zimmer.” So it was quite amazing.

What advice would you give to people getting started in the creative industry?

Advice for people starting out would be, I think there’s three things that have really helped, which has been one, understanding the business side of what you’re doing, and knowing that it’s not a purely creative field.

You’ve also got to find leads, generate leads, know how to do your profit and loss, and all these self-assessment things. You’ve got to understand that side of it.

Second would be network is really important. So either going out to networking events or something that I found really beneficial was just emailing people that I looked up to and just saying, “Hey, look, I’d love an hour of your time just to pick your brains.”

And nine out of 10 times you get a response, and one out of 10 times it’ll actually happen. But you can really aim high with that because people really do like giving back.

And then the last thing I’d say would be utilize new technology. So things like chat GPT and soon to be like auto GPT. So you can just put in a prompt and it will just tell you, “I want to create a pitch deck for X brand,” and it will just put it together and then you can just fine tweak it.

Or putting blog posts out, you can just ask it, “Hey, can you give me a list of blog posts that are good for photographers who work in this field?”

It will give you a list of different headlines, and then you go, “Okay, can you write each of those?” And then it will write them.

So utilizing that technology is going to be a game changer, I think.