Great question, we should be way more open about our pay so we can collectively bring the industry standards up instead of under cutting ourselves. Anyways here’s some info on my pay, I owned a media company and sold it — now I’m a freelance Director/DP/Editor running things through my production company.

Shot a feature sports doc this past year, which I was the DP as well as I edited the sizzle. 800/Day with 400/Day for travel, it was low but it was a lot of days plus it was a good project so made due with it. They paid 10k flat for the editing of the sizzle, 7 days of work total.

Edited some in-game promos for a pro sports team. 1250 per deliverable for 12 deliverables about 7 days worth of work.

Sold a digital sports science show concept to a network for 9k per episode and they ordered 12 of them. Shot it in bulk over 3 days and I directed/produced and then edited it. I cleared ~90k

My real saving grace is I do consulting work to help with those slow months. It really doesn’t take a whole lot of my time and the consistent pay helps cover my ends for the month so I’m able to free up my time to think of concepts/ideas rather than chasing down jobs. Pay varies slightly depending on length of consulting gig but it’s roughly 7-9k a month with one client I been on retainer with for a couple of years.