Working Lives
Short films about what a job involves, told by the person doing it.
Careers sites describe jobs. Almost nobody lets you hear somebody describe their own, in their own words, including the parts they would change.
Every film asks the same four questions, so you can watch three of them and compare a grip’s week against a script supervisor’s.
The four questions
Same four, every time, in the same order.
01 · What do you do on a normal day?
Not the job title. The hours, the first thing you touch in the morning, who you answer to, and the part of it that takes the most time.
02 · How did you get in — the real route, not the tidy one?
Including the luck, the contact, the year of unrelated work, and the thing that would not happen the same way today.
03 · What did nobody tell you?
The unwritten rule, the thing that nearly ended it, the money question, the etiquette you can only learn by getting it wrong once.
04 · What would you say to somebody starting now?
Asked last, on purpose, once they have already described the job honestly rather than sold it.
Who we film
Every level, not just heads of department.
A second assistant two years into the job is more useful to a seventeen-year-old than an award winner is. They remember the first day, they know what the pay was, and they can still name what confused them.
People two to five years in
Close enough to the start to remember it accurately, far enough in to know whether the advice they were given was any good.
The departments nobody profiles
Grip, rigging, standby art, unit, transport, production accounts, script supervision, post coordination. The jobs that are always crewed and almost never explained.
People who left and came back
Or left and did not. A career in this industry is not a straight line and pretending otherwise sets people up to think their own gap is a failure.
People whose route was not the standard one
Different first careers, different ages, different places. If the only route shown is a film degree at eighteen, everybody else concludes it is closed.
Example. One episode follows a grip through a week on a mid-budget drama: the rigging, the load calculations, the early call, and that the route in was a labouring job at a hire company rather than a film course. Illustrative example. Named case studies are published only with written consent.
How they are made
Trainees crew them, which is half the reason they exist.
A recurring short-form series is the best repeatable training exercise we have. It is small enough to crew safely, real enough to matter, and the second episode is always better than the first.
Filmed where the person works
On a unit, in a facility, in a workshop, so you can see the room as well as hear about it
Standard
Contributor approval before publication
Everybody sees their own film and can pull a line, or the whole thing, before it goes out
Standard
Captioned and transcribed
Every film carries subtitles and a text transcript, so the content works without sound or video
Standard
Pay named where the contributor is willing
Vague answers about money are how the industry keeps people underpaid. We ask, and we publish the answer where consent allows
Where agreed
Upcoming episodes
Three in production, released monthly from October 2026: a grip, a production coordinator and a colourist. Contributors are named on release and not before
In production
Take part, or use it
If you do one of these jobs, we would like twenty minutes of your time.
You do not need to be senior, photogenic or certain of what you want to say. If you can describe your own week honestly, that is the whole qualification. Teachers and careers leads are welcome to use any of these films in class without asking.
