Daniel “Frito” Freitas: The content machine who escaped the 9-5 to “do fun” for a living

HERMOSA BEACH, California — Daniel Freitas’ dream job, the one he has labeled as “doing fun” for a living, began as one might expect: Abject misery. He’d taken all the right steps. Checked all the boxes. Got his bachelor’s degree at California Baptist University. Could have taken an extra year to get his masters with […]

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HERMOSA BEACH, California — Daniel Freitas’ dream job, the one he has labeled as “doing fun” for a living, began as one might expect: Abject misery.

He’d taken all the right steps. Checked all the boxes. Got his bachelor’s degree at California Baptist University. Could have taken an extra year to get his masters with his final season of eligibility remaining but decided against it. He’d already been hired for a full-time job in the field he studied. His girlfriend, too, had taken a job.

It was time to move on, continue following the Becoming a Functioning Adult Playbook.

“The team was balling,” Freitas, known to most as Frito, said with a rueful amusement, “and I’m just putting numbers into Excel. Going from Division I college athlete to sitting at a desk was just rough. It was fine, it was a good first experience, but you’re at a desk eight hours.”

And so the Adult Playbook, mostly for worse, continued. He got married. He got divorced. Racked up some credit card debt. Moved back in with his parents. Talked life over with a therapist. When he had finally saved enough to clear out his debt, putting him back at zero, a friend asked if he wanted to move out of his parents’ house.

“My life is already being flipped upside down,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, “I’m just going to do something else. I didn’t have six months saved up. I just went for it. For the human brain, you’re only supposed to do one major life change in a year and I did three or four. It was rough.”

So he moved, and continued flipping his life upside down and inside out and shaking it out for good measure. Just to make sure only the vital parts of the old remained. He made sure one habit stuck: Video production.

Even when he was in college as an outside hitter at Cal Baptist, he’d arrive strapped, almost literally, to the teeth in cameras.

“It was a hobby for so long,” he said. “I was always into GoPros. I had a GoPro in college, had all the attachments, the chest mount, the head piece, back when Instagram was horizontal and 15-second videos.”

He wouldn’t even buy his first real camera until 2016, when a friend in the film industry was unloading his inventory on the cheap. His upgraded assemblage included a $1,000 camera, a few batteries, and a single lens. His portfolio was even more sparse. So he hustled. Once a week, he’d film an open run for professional basketball players called Air West. He never charged a dime, shooting from 7-9 p.m., driving home and editing a video that night — all after working a full shift at his day job. That was every Wednesday for an entire year.

“Before it was figuring it out, barely making money, barely charging anything, because they wouldn’t hire me if it wasn’t 200 bucks or whatever,” he said. Slowly, however, the connections accrued, as did his talent. Soon, he found himself at the crossroads of connections and talent.

A common off-season workout for Los Angeles Clippers and Lakers players are sand runs or sprints or even the occasional game of beach volleyball. A friend of Frito’s since 2014, Sasha Vujacic, a guard whom the Lakers took in the fourth round of the 2004 NBA Draft, was no stranger to sand workouts. When Frito acquired his camera, he’d occasionally shoot for Vujacic. This led to introductions to stars Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan, who regularly powered up and down the near-vertical sand dune in Manhattan Beach. So, too, did Brittany Hochevar.

In 2017, Hochevar was looking for a videographer. If the guy at the sand dune was trusted by NBA players, he’d certainly be good enough for a sport as rogue and uncut as beach volleyball. Frito, then, with just a year of experience with a real camera under his belt, became that videographer.

That year, he was behind the lens as Hochevar and Emily Day won the Manhattan Beach Open.

“Everything I’ve gotten or have done has been through connections,” he said. “It’s been rare I’ll reach out to that person or they’ll find me.”

Sometimes those connections come via the most serendipitous of circumstances. Take the time Frito was playing a municipal golf course in El Segundo called The Lakes. There he happened to meet Tommy Zweibel, the Head of Content for the Clippers. They stayed in contact, each keeping up with one another, until, in 2021, Zweibel needed a shooter for home games.

Would Frito be up for the job?

The timing was, in so many ways, perfect.

Frito had just upgraded his setup, with a $6,000 Sony. He’d also just been told he’d never make it in the business.

In response to Frito raising his rates, an agent of one of Frito’s first clients grew angry, then bitter.

“He sends me a text about he put me on, I didn’t know what I was doing, my business was going to flop,” he recalled. “I was pretty down in the dumps from it.”

Then came the call from Zweibel.

Then came another call, this one from Mpu Dinani, one of the most respected photographers on the AVP Tour, a world Frito had rejoined as a shooter for the McKibbin Brothers in 2021. Would he want to shoot for Conor McGregor on a three-city tour?

“Are you down to go for it?” Mpu asked.

“When?”

“Pretty much now.”

OK.

Virtually overnight, Frito flipped from “down in the dumps” to shooting for a major-market NBA team that would finish 47-25 that year, touring with one of the greatest mixed martial artists to ever live, and immersing himself back into the beach volleyball scene.

“Mostly,” he said, “it’s been connections and being a good person.”

The work he does with the camera and later in post-production helps. Frito has developed a reputation amongst beach volleyball players as one of the quickest to turn around videos that also brim with quality. All those reels you see throughout the summer? Tri Bourne’s insane jump-set, and his controversial collision with Miles Partain under the net at the AVP Huntington Beach Pro Series? That’s Frito. Much of Zana Muno’s viral content? Frito. It’s why he was the man for the job when we needed someone to film at the World Championships, the biggest event on the beach volleyball calendar. He turned around five videos in two weeks along with two-dozen reels. It wasn’t even close to how much he could have done.

“I think that’s almost my bread and butter,” he said of the speed with which he works. “That’s when it gets fun. It’s almost like being an athlete, it’s crunch time, and then trying to go to bed after that? It’s crunch time. How do I turn it off? Especially now with Clipper games. I just take all my best clips and put them into one video, and when I drive home, do I just go to sleep? It’s kinda hard. I’m always thinking about how I can make things a little different.”

His schedule now is as seasonal as the weather. Summers are for beach volleyball, fall and winter for the LA Clippers, spring for the LA Galaxy. Occasionally, Frito and Mpu will team up — it is Mpu who usually lands the gig, and Frito the one he calls for support — for another one-off, like shooting defensive end Aiden Hutchinson in the lead-up to the 2022 NFL Draft, where he was taken with the second pick by the Detroit Lions.

“When one thing ends,” he said, “the next starts.”

This is both the beauty and the curse of being a full-time freelancing content creator. There are times — and this goes for virtually every freelancer — where he craves the clear-cut schedule of a 9-5. When 5 o’clock rolls around, work is over, email is off, the phone calls stop. Now?

“It’s 24-7,” he said. “There’s no structure to my world of work. It’s pretty tough. Even if I get sick, I don’t have anyone else who can take over for me. It’s not like I can call in sick.”

Not like he ever does. Business is booming, and he has an infant son to care for now. There are games and matches and advertisements to be shot, videos to be edited, reels to go viral. There are connections to be made, latent opportunities to be discovered. There is fun to be had. So he packed up his things after recording a podcast in Hermosa Beach, cracked a few jokes about the amateurish set-up, grabbed his camera, and set off.

He had a Clippers game to cover.

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