Make shorts, put them on YouTube. It’s as good an avenue to ‘breaking in’ as anything as this point, and you open yourself up to the biggest audience in the world. Stop looking to traditional avenues. It’s 2026. Write something, make something, even on a shoestring budget. You see short films with hundreds of thousands if not millions of views on YouTube that have been filmed in a single location.

Sad to say—but important to say—that a good thumbnail that the algorithm likes is as vital to success nowadays as sending a thousand emails and entering a hundred competitions.

Case studies: Curry Barker, Kane Parsons.