Do you maintain relationships with your past clients?

If you don’t, you should…

Let me start by saying “I love my job!” Not everybody is lucky enough to do what they love and meet amazing talented people on a daily basis.

I’m one of the lucky ones.

A couple weeks ago I was visiting New York City with my girlfriend for an early birthday trip and I accidentally booked my return flight for Monday rather than Sunday (like she told me to).

Since I had an extra day to hang out in the city I figured I would reach out to a past client of mine (a Jewish bluegrass band called Nefesh Mountain) who were from nearby New Jersey. Before I continue, I want to give you a little backstory about Nefesh Mountain.

Nefesh Mountain is a husband and wife bluegrass duo that consists of Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff. I first met Eric and Doni back in February when they came to Nashville to record their debut album as Nefesh Mountain at the iconic Sound Emporium Studios. I was put in touch with Eric through Juanita Copeland who is the studio manager at the Sound Emporium.

Eric and Doni wanted to document their studio time so they hired me to come in and film their sessions. 

Check out the video below!

Let's jump back to present day…

As I mentioned earlier, I was killing time in New York City after my girlfriend had flown back to Nashville the previous day. I was sitting at a starbucks on the upper east side of Manhattan when I texted Eric to see if he and Doni wanted to grab a coffee before had to head to the airport.

No more than 30 seconds after I pushed send I received a call from Eric.

“Hey Jeff, its crazy that you texted! We were just loading up the car to go shoot a video by ourselves, but if you’re here we would love for you to shoot it!” (That might not be exactly what he said, but you get the point.)

After some debate about how to get to New Jersey (I did still have $10 on my metro card) Eric told me they were in the car and on their way to get me. Twenty minutes later they picked me up and we were on our way to a beautiful park in Eric’s hometown.

Since I wasn’t planning on shooting a music video in the middle of the woods this trip, saying that I didn’t have enough gear would be an significant understatement…

Rather than sitting there complaining about not having the right camera or lenses, we all started deleting any unneeded stuff off our iPhones so we could used them to film the shoot.

I did have one Nikon DSLR with me so we decided to use that as the main camera and have the two iPhones and the Canon EOS Rebel as the 4th and final camera.

If anybody ever tries to tell you that they can’t get desired result because they don’t have the right gear let this be a lesson to you. I was able to shoot a professional quality video in less than 2 hours with two DSLR’s and two cell phones.

One thing that really helped make the filming process so smooth was that Eric and Doni are extremely talented and they nailed each song on the first take… That made my job a million times easier!

Check out the final videos below…

For this last video the edit had to be a little different because both of the iPhones that we were shooting with ran out of memory.  To give it some variety, we shot some b-roll of Eric and Doni which really gave the video a unique look. It may actually be my favorite of the all three.  

Final Thoughts

If I learned anything from this shoot it how important it is to maintain relationships with your past clients because they are your best form of advertisement!  In my case, reaching to a past client for coffee while I was on vacation turned into a job… You never know what might happen!

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Cheers,
-Jeff