No Film School: When I moved to Los Angeles in 2012, I had no idea how much this city ran on the jibs Hollywood provided. The thing is, we often hear about writers, directors, and actors, but the film and television industry provides thousands of other jobs to people.
Those may be jobs you never heard about or dreamt about, but they can provide great and long careers.
9 comments:
I clicked on this article because I really know nothing about jobs in film and TV, expecting it to be a couple of vague paragraphs of how there’s a bunch of different jobs like “wardrobe” and “carpentry” and that it would be interesting, but not deeply informative. However, I was really excited to see that this was basically an alphabetized list of jobs that exist in the film and TV world. I really liked the quick descriptions and especially how many jobs there were. A ton of these job titles are things that I have seen listed in credits at the end of movies and TV shows, but never knew what they are. Especially because I do not have much connection in the film world, I really don’t know much about the definitions of these jobs. One job that I thought sounded interesting was the Automated Dialogue Replacement Editor, which sounds like a pretty cool title.
This list is so cool!!! I'm one of those people who always sits through the end credits of every movie I see, much to the chagrin of my family members who just want to leave the movie theatre already, and this gives me so much more context on what the different roles are! I like reading everyones names because it makes me more appreciative of the amount of effort/labor that went into creating the story. I didn't realize that "armorer" referred to the person in charge of caring for firearms on set, I had always assumed that role referred to a specific costumes craftsperson who made armor. And now I finally know what a best boy is, after dozens of film credits spent wondering what that meant, but forgetting about it before I could google it. Seeing the description for cinematographer reminded me of something that has always kind of fascinated me- we're always lauding directors for their visual style, but rarely cinematographers. Cinematographers are so important to maintaining visual cohesivity and creating beautiful shots, but directors get all the credit! What gives?
So. Many. Positions. There are so many factors that go into putting a movie together, many that I’ve never imagined. A lot of the roles are self explanatory, but some are not what I expected. For a long time when I would see “gaffer” in the credits, I imagined it was someone’s job to simply hard everything on the set. I never realized that the gaffer was the person in charge of lighting. This was a rather informative article. It’s cool to see an exhaustive lists of all the possible jobs waiting in the film industry. I like to see the overlap between theatrical production and the film industry, and it’s also interesting to see the range of jobs that exist in film that you would never think about in theatre. I really liked the insight I gained from this article, and now I will understand more when I watch film credits.
I have been waiting for this article to drop. Ever since it was brought up the other day in production planning, I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of this article. It really shocks me how different the film/TV world is from theatre and live performances. Often, people conflate the two but they really are not that alike. I don’t know if I would ever go into the film and TV industry but having this list really helps with terms and clarifying what is what. I remember in my scenic mini how we talked about how a technical director in theatre is completely different from what a tech director does in film and TV and how that applies to a lot of the roles that have the same name in our world. Prior to reading this article, I had no idea what a key grip was or even what grip meant in this context but it really was super informative. Now whenever I’m looking at credits in movies, I’ll know what is what.
This was a very comprehensive list of the jobs that appear in the film industry. What I noticed right off the bat was that there were several that were similar or even identical to ones that appear in live performance and theatre. Some were exactly the same or just had different names for a similar job. I like how there are shared traits and requirements for both film/TV and theatre. It feels like we are all artists and creavtives working to make entertainment together. Something that I also noticed were specific jobs such as a colorist that don’t really exist in theatre at all. These really intrigued me because it shows how specific you can get with jobs on a film set. This one interested me the most because I have recently begun noticing more the color palettes of films and how it adds to the message and environment created by the film. I hope to get work some of these jobs someday to get a taste of the other side of the coin and how their industry operates.
I’ve never really understood what a lot of the technical positions in film entailed, which for a long time has kept me from imagining any kind of career in the industry. It was really cool to see such a deep dive into the lexicon of film in this article, especially with roles that deviated from theatre. For instance I found it interesting that the Assistant Director position actually seems to match up more with a stage manager’s job, rather than the artistic responsibilities of the director. It was also great to finally learn what “gaffer” means in film, as I’ve often wondered why I don’t see more obvious positions like “lighting technician” or “electrician” in credits sequences. It was also interesting to see the difference between a line producer and executive producer, as well as other producer jobs. I wonder if the “line” in line producer is the same as in “line total,” which seems like it would make sense because both refer to more granular budgeting.
Something that I’ve always found really interesting about the entertainment industry is that so much of it is done with the purpose to not be noticeable to the average consumer. This goes for theatre especially, since so much of what we do is supposed to be magical but in a way that doesn’t remove from the rest of the production, but this is the first time I've sat down and applied that logic to film production as well. It’s really interesting for me to think about what a colorist does, because on the surface that sounds like the kind of thing that wouldn’t need a whole person to do that one task, but I think it’s all about attention to detail. As an artist, I know there are probably so many different slightly varied shades of the film that the colorist would have in order to reach the final product, and it probably takes a lot of time and experience on top of that to get used to understanding color on an instinctual and emotional level to be able to communicate with your intended audience in that way, especially without alienating someone who doesn’t share those cultural understandings.
As someone who aspires to work in the film industry, it is so cool to see each role and job be broken down, picked apart and separated like this. I think the roles of art directors and production designers are amazing and I can't even comprehend how to end up within those positions because of how dreamy they are. There are other roles whose work sounds awesome but that seem so vague such as the creative producer who apparently plans the development of the film at hand. In general, it must be really interesting to see how some of these creative roles interact in a room and how they exactly collaborate under the director's vision. I also find it funny that film critic is a role within this list, because I guess one could say that critiquing films does take a certain expertise, knowledge, and possibly talent? Regardless, its interesting and super cool that so many creative opinions are valued within the production of films.
As my first-time back perusing the Newsquiz since last spring, I was very happy to come across this article regarding employment opportunities within the Film and TV industry. I have recently been exploring the idea of working in the TV/Film industry, particularly live TV, and thus this article was very educational. I enjoyed how simple the information was laid out, strictly in a glossary format. It made it super easy to have quick easily-referencable short definitions. I was most surprised by the Associate Director position. I feel as though in theatre the Associate Director serves as more of an artistic sounding board and assistant, so it was interesting to see that there are different level of associate directors all with different logistical tasks. I am still a little bit confused as to what the difference between a production designer, art director, and show runner. I look forward to learning more about these intricacies.
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