My ideal career path would be to work in a studio environment as a full time employee in animation and work myself up to a role as director to make more creative decisions. However a lot of studios will hire people as freelancers to staff up for various projects. Therefore I have decided to research setting myself up as a freelancer in case I find an opportunity that requires me to be a freelance staff member.
In the United Kingdom, to legally register as a freelancer you need to go through the motions of setting up a business. There are a few different ways to go about this. You can set yourself up as a sole trader or a limited company. It seems that for starting out, setting yourself up as a sole trader is a much more straight forward and lower stakes prospect.
Being a freelancer does come with added responsibility compared to being an employee. Taxes are not taken out of your salary therefore you have to file them yourself which means keeping track of every expense and receipts. This also means setting money aside for when the tax deadline approaches to not find yourself in a precarious situation.
Being a freelancer and working with clients directly rather than with a studio also means understanding your rates. The main two options are setting up an hourly rate and keeping track of working hours or setting a fixed sum paid either upfront or in separate instalments. Working directly with clients however brings up a different set of issues. It’s important to draft up contracts and have them sign it, it’s important to protect yourself from breach of contract and sometimes you can even get insurance with Professional Indemnity Insurance.
Setting up yourself as a freelancer for clients directly also comes with a lot of self promotion and marketing, reaching out to people and a lot of communication. Animation also being what it is, it is often misunderstood in terms of how time consuming it can be and the results you can achieve with certain deadlines, it’s important to make the process known and communicate clearly on ability and deadline.
For me however, I only plan to directly contact clients later on in my career as I want to work in a studio environment first. Therefore the main focus would be to set myself up legally to broaden the types of projects I can work on.
Bibliography
Government Digital Service (2014). Working for yourself. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/working-for-yourself
GOV.UK (2025). Become a sole trader. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/become-sole-trader
Rafal Majdan (2024). How to go freelance – Creative Access. [online] Creative Access. Available at: https://creativeaccess.org.uk/how-to-go-freelance/
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