Meet the Filmmaker | Kylie Purtell - FilmingLife® Community Manager
Kylie Purtell is a family photographer & filmmaker based in Sydney, Australia, and is also the FilmingLife® Academy’s Community Manager & an Educator. She specialises in creating joyful, bold & creative family films for people that don't like to be photographed.
With a passion for creative experiments and a relentless sense of curiosity, Kylie's strengths lie in using creative techniques & colour to capture a family's unique story in a way that's both visually stunning and emotionally charged.
Kylie's work with the FilmingLife® Academy and as a mentor for new & emerging artists allows her the opportunity to do one of her favourite things - support & encourage new filmmakers to reach their highest potential in both art & business.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I live in the Hawkesbury region of Sydney, right at the foot of the Blue Mountains with my husband Dave and our two daughters, Punky (11) & Zee (10). We live a pretty laid-back life, my husband works as a printer and we pretty much spend our weekends hanging out with family or down by the river swimming & fishing.
Basically from the moment I could talk I was constantly asking “why?” and I haven’t stopped since! I have an insatiable need to know things, learn things, figure things out and experiment. This has served me pretty well throughout most of my life, and I think it’s a big part of why I’ve always been drawn to creative pursuits. A useful side-effect of this is that I’m not bad at the old trivia!
Pre-kids I had a background in bookselling both in retail and on the publishing side. Books and reading are probably my other great passions in life, aside from filmmaking/photography, and if I don’t have a camera in hand it will most definitely be a book.
IMAGE CREDIT: Capture by Karen
IMAGE CREDIT: Capture by Karen
IMAGE CREDIT: Capture by Karen
IMAGE CREDIT: Tarynn Walker
Tell us about the kind of photography & films you create
I make films for both personal & client families, and I guess you could characterise them by saying they’re very much rooted in visual creativity & family connection. I’m forever looking for new techniques I can incorporate into my work, and I love colour! I’m not scared to try out new things, and I most often try things first in my personal photos & films, and then if they work I add them to my client toolbag.
I really love capturing details and small moments of connection in amongst the bigger picture, and I truly believe there is no story too small to be told. I’m a recovering camera avoider myself (sooo awkward in front of the lens!) and I know that this can be a big issue for a lot of people, especially mothers. So when I work with a family I try to keep sessions as laid back as possible and capture parents doing what they do best: loving on their kids. My mission in my business is to create photos & films that people actually want to see themselves in, and a big part of that starts at the session itself. Getting to know my client family’s well, building relationships and making the session feel like they’ve just got a friend hanging out with them for the afternoon is how I start creating that sense of happiness & contentment that then comes through in the work I create.
How did you first get started in photography?
I’ve always been a keen hobby photographer, starting when I got my first camera at age 10. I studied photography at high school, and then all through my 20s I was the person who always had a camera in their hand and was documenting everything I could see. I also grew up with a Grandfather & Mother who were prolific family memory keepers, I have hours and hours and hours of home movies of my family that start from when my Grandmother was a young girl right through to today, and that played a large part in developing my own passion for memory keeping through photos & video.
After I had my second daughter in 2013 I decided I didn’t want to go back to my publishing job and working in an office. I wanted to do something that would allow me to set my hours and still spend time with my girls. I had already had a few people asking me to take photos for them, so I decided to build on that and started my business in 2014. In 2015 I enrolled at Tafe (College) and got my Diploma of Photography which was really good for helping me understand how to run a photography business.
What made you decide to learn video? What was your motivation?
I’d always been interested in learning video. As I mentioned above, I have hours of home video footage shot by my Mum & Grandfather, so video is something that was always on my radar. In my final year of high school I was responsible for editing footage shot throughout the year into a couple of videos that commemorated year 12. That was my first taste of working with video and I was hooked. The following year I started a Communications degree at University with the goal of majoring in TV & Film production but ended up leaving after my first year when I realised that the degree wasn’t going to give me the kind of skills & work I was looking for.
Video kind of went on the back-burner after that, and then in 2016, after creating a film for my family of one of our family dinner nights I discovered Courtney Holmes and her amazing family film work and just knew I had to do it! At the time Courtney was running a 4-week online Filming Life Workshop teaching the basics and I couldn’t sign up quick enough.
From that first day of the workshop I was hooked and knew it was something I had to do in a big way, not just for clients but for myself as well. The films I create for my daughters are essentially my love letters to them. When they grow up and watch them I want them to be able to see through these films just how much I love them. I want to give them the same kind of record of their childhood that I had, those old home movies that I treasure so much. Giving them that gift is what keeps me going, even when it feels hard.
What was your biggest challenge when you first started learning video and how did you overcome it?
With any new skill there are frustrations that come with figuring out the technical aspects of it all, and that’s especially true when it comes to filming and learning the editing programs. But honestly my biggest challenge was probably self-doubt. I often found myself frustrated when things didn’t turn out exactly as I wanted them too, and I found myself constantly comparing myself to others and (in my mind) not stacking up. I wanted to be really good really quickly, and I didn’t understand why I wasn’t making professional level films as quickly as possible.
It took a couple of years of hard work and learning to stop comparing myself to others to get to a place where I started to see results. I stopped letting my crippling fear of not being “good enough” stop me from continuing to create and just threw myself into creating for myself. Making a large number of personal films throughout 2018 without the pressure of creating them for public consumption or for clients was really freeing, and the things I learned definitely helped me level up what I was offering & creating for clients.
Did you find it a challenge to educate clients on the value of films, how were they first received by clients?
To an extent. I wanted to make films a bigger part of my business but it’s hard to do that when you don’t have anything to show people to explain this is what it is and this is how special it will be for you and your family. So as well as my personal films, I spent a lot of time doing portfolio shoots so that I would have a good body of work to showcase on my website & social media accounts. I was lucky to be in a position where I could create films for free for my portfolio, and with the help of 1:1 mentoring with Courtney I was able to set up a series of strategic portfolio sessions that gave me a chance to not only work on my filming skills but also build relationships and extend my network.
Having those portfolio sessions under my belt meant that I had work that wasn’t just of my own family to show, and it definitely put me in front of more people and helped me to start booking more films. I run my business as a part-time entity (the other half of my week I work for Courtney at the FilmingLife® Academy) and I directly credit my personal films and the portfolio building sessions I did, as well as the connections I’ve made through social media in helping me to book my target number of films each year.
Tell us about your favourite film and why it's special to you
Oh man, that’s a hard one, just about every personal film I create (and let’s be honest, most of my client films as well!) becomes an instant favourite, but if I had to narrow it down, there would be two.
The first is the film I made of our Finland trip at the end of November last year. At the start of 2019 I entered a giveaway run by Canon Australia to win “The Trip of a Lifetime” and somehow I managed to win us an all-expenses paid family holiday to Finland for 9 nights. We spent a couple of days in the capital Helsinki and visiting Estonia, and then we travelled further north to Lapland to go to the home of Santa Claus and explore the Arctic Circle. It absolutely was the trip of a lifetime, and I can honestly say we have all watched the film I made of our holiday at least 100 times, it just gives us so much joy. I’m incredibly grateful that I had the skills to pull this together for us. A majority of the footage was shot on my iPhone XS Max and it just goes to show that you don’t have to always have the fanciest camera to capture meaningful memories and create something special.
My other favourite film would be the film I created during lockdown for the ArtHouse Motherhood theme. Like everyone else, I have sooooo many phone videos and old camcorder videos of my girls growing up through the years, and I really wanted to do something with it all and get as much as I could into a film. So I took the words I wrote on my blog just before my eldest daughter first started school back in 2017, and used them as the framework for creating my film.
I added a VHS look and 4x3 matte to the older footage, and then combined that with new footage I’d shot of the girls during lockdown and the previous 12 months, and laid a voiceover of my speaking my blog post over the top to pull it all together. The end result is something that makes me teary every time I watch it, and it was so worth the time & effort I put into it to have this incredible time capsule of the first 6-8 years of my daughter’s lives.
What is your best piece of advice for those just getting started with films?
Don’t overthink it. Shoot as much as you can, as often as you can. Don’t compare yourself to others, the only thing that matters is that each film you make you learn something new and improve just a little bit.
It takes time to to learn all the skills and it definitely takes time to build family films into a significant part of your business, so don’t be discouraged if you’ve been doing it for 6 months and haven’t booked as many films as you’d like. You will get there if you keep at it and put in the work of not just developing your filmmaking skills, but also learning how to market them and make connections with real people.
And don’t be afraid to try new things. Just because you haven’t seen it done before doesn’t mean you can’t give it a try!
See more of Kylie’s work via her website - www.kyliepurtell.com.au - and social media - IG: @kyliepurtell
