If you already work on units
You already do the job. Here is what this place is for.
Most of this site answers the question people ask on the way in. This page answers the one people ask five years later, which is harder and gets asked less often.
Futures in Film runs working film units at Pinewood. Manufacturers send kit here to be tested. Productions take crew, equipment and space. If you are already working, there are four things here that are yours to use.
Four things
What a working professional gets out of this.
Kit before it ships
Manufacturers bring equipment to the test room to be put through a shooting day. The people who run it are working heads of department. If you want your hands on a system before it is on a call sheet, this is where that happens, and it happens months earlier than the rental catalogue.
Teaching work
Every course here is taught by people currently working. That is not a volunteering appeal. It is skilled work, scheduled around a shooting calendar, and it is how most of our instructors first came through the door.
The rooms and the floor
Prep space, test rooms and a working unit base at the Ken Adam Building. Somewhere to build a rig, try a configuration, or rehearse a move that you cannot try for the first time on the day.
The next grade
The gap between a second credit and a third is a network problem, not a skills problem. We run supervised positions on real productions, and we are asked by productions who wants stepping up.
Why we are asking
The test only works if experienced people are in the room.
A product tested only by people meeting it for the first time tells a manufacturer what is confusing. A product tested only by experienced crew tells them nothing, because experienced crew adapt to a fault without noticing they have done it.
Both, in the same room, on the same day, is the whole method. It does not run without working heads of department, which is why this is an offer and not a favour.
Camera built up on a slider, crew working behind
Also here
The rest of it.
The third-credit problem
Where most people leave the industry: not at the door, but two years past it.
Certification
A record of attendance and demonstrated competence, recognised by the people who watched you do it.
Courses
Department by department, first day to head of department. Several of them are pitched above entry level.
Start
Tell us what you do and what you are trying to reach.
There is no form for this that makes sense, so there is not one. Say what department you are in, what your last two jobs were, and what you want next.
