There are many different ways to start out in the film industry, but which of them is best for you? Some people choose to go to film school first vs others who opt to get hands-on set experience by working their way up from the lowest position that will hire them. I had the opportunity to start as a background actor when I was 11. But as I got older, I moved up to stand-in work, then I became a PA until I eventually started getting a better idea of what department I really wanted to focus on. I was fortunate to be able to come back to school and take film classes anyway, so now I would like to share some of the differences in each option to help you decide for yourself how you’d might want to approach the film industry for the first time.
Let me start off by reiterating that neither approach is better or worse than the other. However, you may start to recognize certain advantages with one that might align better with your personal goals. For instance, going to a film school needs to be funded somehow, and that just might not be in the cards for everyone. There are lots of scholarships or resources available if you can’t afford it out of pocket (I know I can’t), but that can be a big reason why many try to start getting work on set right away instead. You don’t need much experience to book background work and it is a great way to start watching how film crews work to familiarize yourself with the lingo and set etiquette. You wouldn’t want to go up talking to all the crew as a background actor, but it's great to network “within your league” with other more experienced background actors to help you learn more about how to move up. If you are nice to the background PA, they might also share resources with you about how to get your foot further in the door.
Keep in mind that film sets will almost always have you working long 12-14 hour days which might be hard to adjust to if you are used to working normal 4-10 hour shifts at your previous job. You don't want to be the guy that gets sent home on his first day for cracking under the pressure of set life... (not that I know anything about that...)
Once you do manage to get consistent work on a film set, the crew and department you work in becomes your family and your life. By time they wrap for the weekend, they'll usually want to go have a drink and you'll usually just want to sleep for 24 hours before it's time to do it all over again. You need a reason to love this job in order to survive it.
There’s a bit of a double edged sword with building and maintaining a reputation in the film industry. 9 times out of 10, your next job was a referral from a boss you worked for previously. If you show professionalism and a good attitude on your first PA job, you’ll start getting more and more work in that department until you can eventually branch off to the craft you're really interested in focusing on. But word travels far and fast when someone makes a critical mistake or isn't putting in the necessary team effort. You don’t want to be the one that's blacklisted from the industry because you didn't know better before accidentally ruining a shot, or worse, putting the crew in danger.
At a film school, you have the freedom to learn without worrying about such extreme consequences for making mistakes. You’ll gain experience making student films with a micro-budget where you won’t be wasting thousands of dollars by accidentally formatting a card with all the footage from the day before. You’d think that would never happen, but it still happens with less experienced film students. The good thing is those are the students that never make a mistake like that again because they understand the severity of the consequences after reshooting (or cutting) everything they lost. Usually camera departments have a DIT (digital Imaging tech) on union projects whose main job is to ensure all the files are offloaded and backed up after every shooting day to ensure a mistake like this would never happen.
If you know exactly what department you want to work in, you can focus all your attention on getting more work related to that craft and learn as you go. But if you’d prefer to “shop around” until you find your fit, it might be helpful to even just take a basic film crew class to get a little bit of experience in lots of different departments. Now that doesn't mean you HAVE to go to school to learn those things, it's just probably a more effective way to learn things according to industry standards in just a couple of semesters. I went a different route earlier in my career by volunteering on low-budget indie shorts to get an idea of what jobs I like most, and what I learned was that those sets are way different from the union sets I was working on as a stand-in. They cut corners or improvise important elements when a project was planned or budgeted poorly and I was left wondering how helpful my experience would be if I ever got work in that department on a union project. That doesn't mean don’t do them… By all means, do whatever you can to get more set experience in the early stage of your career. What matters is that you put the time and effort into being prepared to do your best on any opportunity presented to you. Act as if every job you work is your interview for the job you really want because you never know who is watching. You could be working on a student film with a director who goes on to make movies for big production studios and the impression you made on them during school may determine how well they remember you while crewing up their core team.
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-Daniel Ward
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