How You Start Your Career in The Film Industry Starting From Scratch

A lot of people think working in film means getting “a job,” like working at a store or an office. But in the film industry, a job is just one day on set.

To have a real career, you have to keep getting hired for new shoots over and over—hundreds of times!

How to break into the tight-knit circles in film and TV—turn one job into your next five, then into your next 50

This is my favorite subject. This is about getting IN!

Know this: There are people who are already doing the job you want to do.

How to feel confident on film sets

Where does self-confidence come from?

We think we feel confidence when we have already done something. Like if you’ve played basketball, you feel confident in your ability to play basketball.

How to prepare so you look like a rockstar and not a rock (like I did)

When I got on my first real set in LA, it was Scorpion Spring, a feature film shot in the Anza Borrego desert, about three hours south of LA.

It was a film with Matthew McConaughey and Alfred Molina. They were newbie actors, just getting started with their careers and I was too.

Your roadmap to your first job in film and TV

If you’re just starting your film career, it can be challenging to understand what jobs to start out in, which jobs you’d like to do, and how to go about finding work to get into those jobs.

Further, you may wonder if your background and skill set will be enough to work in this business. You may wonder if it’s too late to start a career in film. And if you’ve been trying to get into mainstream film work for a while, and are stuck in unpaid indie films, it can feel like the professional work is a closed shop.

While footage-producing companies offer decent-looking produced scenes for actor reels, there are potential drawbacks, especially when considering the importance of actual on-set experience and credited roles in feature films and TV shows as being what makes a difference to one’s career.

Lack of Authentic Credits: Scenes produced by these companies are not from real film or TV projects. Therefore, they don’t provide genuine credits to an actor’s resume. Casting directors and agents often look for real-world experience and credits, as these indicate an actor’s level and on-set experience.

Making the decision to leave your survival job and prioritize your film career can be stressful. There’s probably a lot of unknowns there, and that uncertainty can be paralyzing.

There are two things that can settle your mind in making this transition: developing a mental image of who and where you want to be in life, and having a plan in how to get there. If you knew a path into the film industry, would you take the leap?

An extremely common and unfortunately ineffective strategy to break into the production side is to contact production houses cold, without ever having worked on professional sets, and offering to work for free. There are a ton of people doing this and I never hear of this getting someone connections or work.

One issue is that there isn’t a lot of overturn in editing. Once people are in those jobs they are locked in for the long haul, so you need a way to get inside and get referred.

A really common problem I see is people getting stuck as a production assistant for years. Nobody gets into the film industry to be a PA, and yet so many get trapped in that space. They know they want to write, or work camera, or direct, but they don’t know how to move from the free shoots to the small budget shoots, from there to mid-sized projects, and then onto the biggest stuff in the industry where they’re making $650-$1000 a day or more.

The solution is both simple and complex: you need to be making good connections and you need to be working alongside professionals.

If you’ve been with us a while, you’ll hear me and the A-list Mentors talk about how the traditional method to get on camera and get speaking roles doesn’t work well in the modern industry. You can do hundreds of auditions but the people deciding who gets the role don’t know you, don’t have any familiarity with how you are to work with. There will be tons of actors auditioning for that same role that are in that same boat. There is a better way.

By getting on set through production, you will make critical connections with the people involved in casting. This includes the casting director, the director, and sometimes the producer. You can leverage those connections to get into the audition room more easily, and once there, they will have some familiarity with you.