How a Camera Changed My Life: From Call Centre to Videographer

I was a cold-calling, commission-chasing call centre employee before I ever picked up a camera. Selling things people didn't need, didn't want, just to pay rent. Not glamorous. But it's exactly where my filmmaking story starts, and where yours might too.

At 18, I auditioned for a national TV presenter search and came second. Close enough to taste it. Close enough to move from my traffic-light-free hometown to the chaos of Johannesburg with zero plan and way more confidence than sense.

I landed my first TV gig at 19. Three years later, the show got cancelled, and I was back to square one: no income, a stack of failed auditions, and a girlfriend (now wife) with an actual career while I scrambled.

So I took the call centre job. Not because it was the dream, but because bills don't pay themselves. It's an honest, unglamorous chapter, and it's the one that makes everything after it mean something.

Everything changed on a trip to visit my brother in Scotland. He'd picked up a Canon 5D Mark II as a hobby, gotten scary good at it, and quit his carpentry job to become a wedding photographer (still is one today). He taught me the fundamentals: ISO, aperture, shutter speed, composition, night photography, the whole foundation.

Halfway through that trip, I started messing with the video function on that same DSLR. Remember: this was 2011, and shooting motion on a stills camera at all was brand new. It felt like science fiction.

By the end of the trip, my brother and I shot a mock advert together. My first ever video. No image stabilization, no autofocus, every shot framed way too tight, and shot in black and white because I had no idea how to color correct. It is, objectively, not good. But it remains one of the most important pieces of footage I own, because it was the first time I'd made something from nothing.

Back in South Africa, I saved up and bought a Canon 550D. 24 frames a second at 1080p, and a 720p slow-motion mode at 50fps. Specs that sound like a joke today, but at the time it was everything I needed. I filmed everything I could point it at.

A few months later, with a half-metre slider as my first piece of gear, I shot my first music video for a friend.

He submitted it to TV without telling me. It landed on MTV. Not just aired, but in heavy rotation. The messages started rolling in from people who wanted to pay me to film their music videos.

Six months after that, I quit the call centre. My then-girlfriend asked the obvious question: "How are we going to pay rent, Kyle?" A year later, she joined the business. She's still part of it today.

This isn't a flex. It's proof of concept. If you're passionate, willing to learn for free on YouTube, willing to go out and make mistakes, and willing to fix those mistakes the next time you pick up a camera, you can build a real career without a film degree.

Since 2011, hundreds of music videos and countless shoots across the world later, that first ugly, black-and-white, badly-framed video is still the one I think about when the work feels heavy. It's the reminder of why I started.