I run a one-person video business. I make ads, content and event films for coaches, speakers, educators and businesses — mostly across Kent, London and the South East. But I didn’t start anywhere near a camera.

I’m from Bulgaria, and I came to filmmaking the long way round. I began studying engineering in Varna. Then, in my second year, I spent a summer on a work programme in Alaska, and that cracked the world open a bit. When I got back, I started working as a holiday entertainer — running the sports and games by the pool in the day, and hosting the shows at night: comedy, dancing, bingo, the lot. Bulgaria, then Greece, then a season in Majorca.

Learning to read a room

That’s where the real skill started, though I had no idea at the time. Night after night on stage, I learned how to read a room. How to make people laugh, how to feed off their energy, how to take a nervous crowd and turn the evening into something they’d remember. I was good with people. I just hadn’t worked out what it was for yet.

I wanted some promo material, so I asked tourists to film me on stage on their little cameras — grainy, low light, nothing special. I couldn’t edit, so I talked a friend back home through exactly what I wanted and he cut it together. That was my first taste of directing, really: describing the film in my head and getting someone else to make it real.

When I moved to the UK, I took that showreel round the talent agencies. Every door shut. “We don’t do this.” It knocked the wind out of me enough that I parked the whole idea and took a job as a concierge to pay the bills.

Going around the gatekeepers

It took me until 2016 to realise something obvious: I didn’t need the gatekeepers. If nobody would open the door, I’d go around it. So I started a YouTube channel — Curious Pavel — making little videos about London for the people who come to see it. The curious bits behind the famous sights. (Ask me about Big Ben sometime.)

I wasn’t trying to be a YouTuber. I was building a portfolio in public. One video a week, every Tuesday, for a year and a half. No shortcuts - just showing up.

That consistency is what changed everything. Through the channel, and turning up to every networking event I could, someone pointed me toward a job: they wanted a videographer who could also present. In the interview, they pulled my YouTube channel up on the TV and asked me about my shots - why I framed it that way, what settings I used, how I’d researched it. They hired me on the strength of work I’d made for nobody but myself. Still one of my proudest days.

On my own

From there I went to work as a videographer for the property entrepreneur Samuel Leeds - I was filming in Uganda with him inside my first month, and stayed a year and a half. Then the itch to do it on my own got too loud. Just after the pandemic, I left and started my own video production business.

I got lucky with the timing. A guy who lived near me got in touch - not for a wedding, he said, but for someone who could make video ads for his coaching business. That was Andy Harrington. The ads and webinars I made for Andy became the foundation of everything, and it snowballed from there - Samuel Leeds, Jazz Rose, Rahim Bah, Wealth Dragons and others - almost entirely through word of mouth. People saw the work, told someone else, and that someone got in touch. I’ve made more than 500 videos that way since 2019.

The camera was never the hard part

Here’s the thing I only understood looking back - because you only ever join the dots backwards. All those years reading crowds, working reception desks, hosting rooms full of strangers: none of it was a detour. The camera was never the hard part. The hard part is making someone relax, drop the performance, and look like themselves when a lens is pointed at them. That’s the bit most people dread - and it’s the exact bit all my people-facing years trained me for. I don’t just film you. I direct you, the way I used to work a room.

Why one person, not a crew

It’s also why working with one person beats a big production house for what I do. There’s no chain of emails to make a simple decision, no crew to brief, no waiting on three suppliers for your files. I turn up light, I’m quick to brief on the day, and I can get shots a bigger outfit can’t - one person with a camera moves through places three cameras and a boom never could. More speed, more flexibility, less fuss. One point of contact, one invoice.

These days I’m based in Kent and work across London and the South East, making ads and content for people who teach, and filming corporate events end to end. I still post on Curious Pavel - old habits. And when an event needs a host as well as a camera, I do that too, under Hosted by Pav.

If you’ve got something worth saying, or an event worth capturing, that’s what I’m here for.