After I graduated from film school, I still wasn’t 100% certain that I wanted to start working in movies right away. I was debating between going to graduate school for who knows what or trying out the filmmaking thing. I was still working for Cinematexas International Short Film Festival but knew that was really just serving to delay the inevitable: making a decision.
My best friend had decided right away it was what she wanted to do, so she had been working on local short films here and there. I finally told her I was ready to make the choice to work on movies. Luckily for me, she was about to produce a feature-length horror film. It was a small budget, local film, with a tiny crew. Since I wasn’t sure what I really wanted to do, I told her I would be a PA for her. For those not in with the unglamorous world of filmmaking, a PA is a Production Assistant and basically means everyone’s slave. It is pretty much the bottom rung. But at that point I really just needed to get some work on my resume that wasn’t a student project.
Because of how small the project was, the schedule was far from what many movies deal with. There weren’t incredibly early call times or really late nights. And the PAs were scheduled in shifts, so I didn’t have to work a full day every day.
I found myself fitting into a groove with the people working in the production office. I liked the organizational tasks. Unlike in my personal life, when working on a project I am rather anal and enjoy knowing that things are being done when they need to be done. I was extremely fortunate in that the Production Coordinator and Production Manager were interested in helping me learn the ropes too. I was given a few books to look over that described the actual tasks of a few positions they felt I would be good at doing. The actual tasks meaning not the glossy version you’re told about in film school.
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