Contents

You may excuse me for making such explosive statements in this article while also talking very little about working on actual film productions.

Those opportunities barely exist in my country, or are in a way, focused within other fields that are far from what I was initially interested in, which leaves me with little firsthand experience to draw from when talking about movie making and TV shows, this article does not talk about them. You may have better in filmmaking luck if you live in California or anywhere else in the world that has a blooming filmmaking field. Or if you're stubborn enough to find the right people to reach the right job for you which would obviously work in any other career.

You are more than free to ignore this article and continue with your future career, but in the case of you're someone living in Latin America (or anywhere that isn't Hollywood) you may keep on reading.

Working for Social Media

The first great thing to know before enrolling in a Film degree is realizing that my personal projects, my portfolio, and my connections will probably talk first before my degree.

The next great thing to know is that most of the work you will find on most job platforms revolve more in the social media field regardless if it's freelancing or not.

The most common areas in the career seem to be administrative and social media both of which require you to be an extroverted person. You will spend much of your time calling and messaging clients about production agreements, invoices, budgets, scripts, production costs, and any other paperwork a film production may need before a filming session begins.

If you end up in a role focused primarily on social media, your work will revolve more around the image and final result of a project rather than the production process itself, this is again, because you're the one planning on it rather than producing it.

It is still technically related to filmmaking, but it is less about operating a camera or setting up lights and more about selling something, whether that idea is creative or not depends largely by the client. And in the case of an administrative role focused on social media, you will be moving even further away from your gear or technical skills you might have gotten for filmmaking.

You will get on calls with clients and explain how their social media presence can grow through a Social Media Content Package or as some start-up companies might call it nowadays, Short-Form Video Package (I am taking this name from a direct translation from my native language, it could have a more sophisticated term in your language). You will try to convince the client that your marketing agency can transform their brand or page and introduce it to a wider audience through funny, relatable or informative short-form videos designed with viral appeal in mind, with the usage of the latest and popular buzzwords, memes or trends. You may even throw terms such as "AI" into the conversation to demonstrate that your agency is both familiar and sided with current trends. If your role also includes it, you may also manage their social media accounts and schedule content according to any engagement strategies and hourly trends.

I already knew that working for brands, marketing or for social media would be among the most common fields that would be available in the career. I began studying filmmaking in a time where social media platforms were already behemoths of influential power.

What I didn't know before graduating was that they would also be among the few positions that offered what is unfortunately, now considered a luxury... getting paid on time, which is something I also never thought I had to worry about.

Naturally, after realizing this, it made me want to give the field a fair chance. I thought, at the tine, that I had to try immersing myself in the field.

I wasn't interested in sales, talking to clients, convincing them, or even look out for them at first, but if these were among the most stable and accessible opportunities available to me, then it only made sense to try to understand it.

I am not in any way discrediting the line of work related to sales or marketing within the film or social media sphere. If anything, I envy the people who choose and thrive in this field. I have met peers who eat, sleep, and breathe social media marketing in such a way that they make anything they do seem effortless to anyone who is neither an extrovert nor naturally interested in sales. They instinctively know what is attractive to clients and what are they willing to pay for. Watching them work often felt like watching two simultaneous professions being applied to one single task, and I would go as far and claim it convinced me for a while that not only I could like this skill set but also that it was one I needed to acquire in order to progress in my career.

I tried multiple times to adopt that mindset of seeing and envisioning something attractive for clients and their social media presence. I even caught myself speaking their language of sales and strategy with peers and clients despite never being genuinely interested in sales. I proposed ideas based on trends I found online even if I personally viewed social media as the mark of the beast, and even adopted that "viral" approach mindset in their scripts. I learned how to propose ideas in a way that reassured the clients and aligned an image with one they wanted to project online. And after enough messages and feedback, I was able to identify what a client actually without the need of a brief script (most of the times it won't be needed).

Part of the reason I kept trying was because I could clearly see the advantages of the field (and also because I spent quite some time and money in the degree already). The work was in demand, the opportunities were frequent and unlike many other areas of the career, there was at least a realistic path toward stability despite the fact that one of my previous and most important jobs from my career didn't offered me social benefits.

Every time I considered leaving the marketing field, I would, partly in a malicious way, imagine that the only paths left to me would be either freelancing or indie-film work, even though there were many other stable fields and opportunities within the industry that had nothing to do with marketing agencies. It's just that I didn't know about them (also because Indeed and LinkedIn are filled with marketing jobs).

I thought, at the time, that building interest in this one explosive and extroverted field would follow actual engagement from my part.

But despite my best and most prolonged efforts, I never found enough interest to keep myself in it. I am thankful for the skills the field and my peers taught me because they strike me as fundamental or core skills that could very much be applied anywhere. I could become reasonably good at it, and I was in a way good in it, but I would still never be genuinely interested in it the same way my peers were, not even after taking one or two weeks of PTO.

What struck fear to me was believing that this was the most stable and profitable side of the career, the one focused on selling something in social media instead of anything truly creative and personal. Here, I was thinking on the product or influencer as the first layer on the canvas, where I would then combine stock transitions and my acquired knowledge of film language to make sure the cuts between two people talking weren't breaking the 180° rule.

And yes, businesses need results, clients need visibility, audience growth and production companies need revenue. Social media is the current medium bringing all these things together. We could sit and talk about how marketing has ruined thousands of creative visions or some of our favorite shows, but it is still one the main reasons why this career (and many others) exists at all.

If you plan on studying filmmaking, you should be more than comfortable with the possibility that a significant portion of your career may revolve around sales, marketing and social media and that it will not be enough to just tolerate it. You need a genuine interest in it. You need to find any enjoyment in helping brands and clients's audience grow, you will have to enjoy communicating with them, sell an idea and turn it into a convincing video. Simply telling yourself that you can put up with it will make your current job have a time-bomb attached to it.

What made most of my toxic beliefs about the career quite rather believable was the turbulent differences between my peers in the jobs and experiences they had. In many other careers, you need the degree, that's not negotiable. It's the first thing they and will basically determine whether you will land a new job or not.

In filmmaking, it was quite confusing to grasp. Some people didn’t have a degree and still had lucrative opportunities, others dropped out halfway through their careers and also similar jobs, while some who seemed to have a stable career only had two-month-long jobs. Others would ride the freelancing wave and work almost every day of the week in social events and venues.

I would to this day, have the belief that I will probably meet dozens more people with greater experience and success in the field and learn that they didn’t study filmmaking formally.

I know this reality exists in many other careers, but there were times when my current line of work included many people from different professional backgrounds who didn't have degrees that it made me believe that having a degree, no longer mattered as much in this age.

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One year short of getting my degree, I landed on my second marketing agency job that seemingly had a strong focus on production. I was now about to become the person behind the camera rather than the one speaking to the client through WhatsApp. My days of being stubborn enough to want to be the camera operator, the one setting up the lights, recording audio or composing shots were finally becoming a reality. And this sounded much closer to what I imagined myself doing exclusively when I decided to study filmmaking.

Unfortunately, that path, came with a different set of problems.

This last job was the one that taught me how to talk to clients and everything I described earlier in this section, but those were indirect effects.

Filming for Social Media

Someone else has already sold a creative idea, you have the production set and vague briefs ready and I am about to hit the record button. What does this entailed?

Another great thing to know before enrolling in filmmaking is that regardless of the type of production you work on or how many hours you spend in the studio, you will probably end up surprisingly tired. I have worked on many productions, and no matter how much sleep I got or how well fed I was beforehand, I would walk away feeling roughly the same level of exhaustion whether the recording session lasted four or eleven hours.

And yes, sessions lasting eight hours or more are not rare.

Everything about production is time consuming and tedious, and that's on top of having a really tight schedule. Often times you will end up extending the shooting days because one single thing in the production went wrong, other times you will have to force the talent to shoot the entire brief in one single recording with all of the mistakes you can easily avoid because you have another one in two hours. Rare are the times where a session goes according to plan.

You might end up at a production company that prioritizes the schedule, and that would be the best case scenario. But more often than not, many production houses and marketing agencies are constantly behind schedule, and it will be your responsibility to improvise everything in your power in order to get anything finished on time. In these situations, your best case may be simply having the opportunity to skip one or two clips from the script and lie about it. Arriving and starting another recording session in time suddenly becomes more important than fully recording what the script or the creative idea had in mind for the final production. What's there to worry about? You or the editors can fix anything in post-production, right?

At times, I had to remind myself that I wasn't recording an innovative or creative narrative scene, but rather a commercial in the form of an Instagram Reel. It already had a simplified aesthetic and an audience growth strategy behind it.

I was recording doctors, dentists, restaurants, gyms, real estate agents, local businesses, clothing stores, and whatever product or service they happen to be selling. They weren't nothing like a movie or a TV Show; I already knew this would be the case the moment I signed up the contract. I was happy enough to just now focus on recording.

Another added responsibility in this marketing agency was making sure that the client expectations remained somewhere below the size of the Earth, this in retrospective, happens in most other fields, it's just that I was now doing it face to face.

When you think about it, you will realize that once the viewer, I mean, the future doomscroller, watches the video, and unconsciously spots any irregularity in the video such as bad lighting, a lower audio clip, a more than sudden J-Cut, a bad pronunciation from the teleprompter or an extremely predictable stock material, they will, at the speed of 1 millisecond skip the video entirely without even trying to surpass their attention span, thus rendering the entire effort behind the video pretty much inexistent.

In filmmaking, there's always a small threshold for production errors that you or the viewer can account for. In social media, that threshold should always range between zero and... zero, including natural factors (i.e the sun not helping you).

There are many final videos I've watched that contain one or three small production errors, including editing ones, that I fully believe are just noticeable enough, even to my editing eyes, that make people stop watching the video entirely. We could sit and argue that this is because of the failed or systematically viral strategy the scriptwriters chose for the clients, but I would argue even harder that there is always something wrong with the production and editing that makes those final videos reach the modest view count of just fifty. Of course, we were always striving to make those mistakes range between zero and zero, but there was something in this agency that made those attempts pointless.

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Sooner or later you will also unconsciously learn the language of the trends, the algorithms of the social media and its idiosyncrasies, not everything about social media its written on paper, rather is something you naturally pick up and understand silently after being exposed to social media short form content for way too long.

If you eat social media for breakfast and follow the newest trends closely (you mostly do unintentionally at this point because you're addicted to social media) then congratulations this "skill" has been already applied to your career and will help you tremendously. To anyone else who wants to become a neo-luddite because they don't want to give more power to The Powers That B FAANG, bad news, you will have to install TikTok and Instagram in your smartphone and constantly fight with your willpower to not succumb to any of their predatory algorithms.

In some recording sessions, the client and I had to brainstorm a new video outside of the already agreed content package because very understandably, the script didn't fitted neither him or the store's image or brand, so we had to take out our smartphones, search for their line of work and scroll enough to find a trend the client would like. And this activity that seems to happen way more often than expected, is trivial at best but it's also a reminder in how far way you have strayed from what you or I had originally thought about studying filmmaking.

But, regardless of all this, I would be lying if I claimed there was nothing appealing about working for a Marketing or Sales agency.

The accomplishment felt once you see your finished and delivered work is still great and worth admiring someone for, I would frequently compare and be amazed by some of the shots my peers did for other clients from the same agency. You're the one who took the shot, you are the one who decided to change that one scene for one that was much better. You were turning incomplete and vague briefs into fleshed out videos that on top of being edited with a lot of revisions from the client (by either us or a separate department), they were something they ultimately agreed on and liked about.

You can also become quite proficient at solving problems quickly while on site, a major skill to have, even without the client's realization. Whether it is changing or proposing new ideas for a script, or taping the client's annoying office light in such a way that it works on your favor. Every session is different, so are the clients, the crew, the sets and ideas which will give you an endless amount of small choices that will amount to a production that will feel like your own.

For brief periods of time you suddenly stop thinking about algorithms, attention spans, the languages of sales and will focus on the creative process of solving anything, which is also one of the few things in this marketing field that is still tightly related to the career, and it feels exactly as rewarding as you imagined after getting over anything.

Despite all of this, they remained, to me, just as mere moments. This marketing field has its moments where it does make sense to stay. That it can be remain enjoyable, but everything in this field will still be about marketing, it will still be about branding and chasing Tiktok trends. It will still be something that slowly rots the core of my being.

If you enjoy working in social media and marketing, and this entire field sounds appealing to you, I am more than envy of your interests.

And I know, I very well much know, what you might be thinking. That I, or any future filmmaking student are naive to believe that studying filmmaking was an opportunity or even a guarantee to work in... filmmaking for movies and TV shows.

That we should have understood from the beginning that commercials, social media content, and social media marketing agencies would offer far more opportunities (or the only existing opportunities) than traditional film productions ever could. In this new world where every business, entrepreneurs and brand needs an online presence, perhaps we should have expected Filmmaking and Social Media Content Creation to become almost synonymous.

And to some extent, I agree. Because we, as students, had to be more wary of the current job market before even finishing our degree, we had to adapt and learn, just as students in any other field would, to the latest trends and major changes within our profession. But at least in my generation, the discrepancy between what the market was looking for and what we were being taught was so gigantic that it almost seemed as though the degree itself had some kind of malice attached to it.

We studied filmmaking, the language, semiotics, sound design, motifs, symbolism, and so much more for something akin to a movie, a short film or a TV Show, only to end up applying those same concepts in such a different way for social media and marketing that they barely resemble what we were initially taught.

The current curriculum at the film college I attended to may have changed already, but I will never stop thinking that that change might have come late for my generation.

Knowing what truly comes in the job market for filmography might not matter at all (it may be the same for any other field), because almost every job listing on job platforms will list the requirement to be a know-it-all person, sure they won't say it this explicitly, but they will make you understand they're looking for someone who can do everything a graduate might have seen what ten people do.

If the industry expects you to be a jack-of-all-trades anyway, why not lean into it and build something of your own?

What would happen if you decide that marketing is totally not for you and decide to go all in exclusively on production by yourself? You're more likely to gravitate toward editing, shooting, and taking on projects independently. You can even try your luck at founding your own production house with other peers you might have met along the way. It works for many; others have willingly embraced that path and built successful careers out of it.

What is stopping you?

Freelancing

Another great thing to know before enrolling in a Film program is that you might not need a degree for it. This can either be the greatest or the worst thing to hear.

I am not stating that every job outside of marketing automatically counts as freelancing. What I want you understand is that many positions in the industry end up functioning like freelance work because of how managers and companies have glamorized temporary contracts as the next best thing in the world after sliced bread tax breaks.

This results in the very common story of our work getting undervalued. It won't matter what you do or who you work for. You could be photographing the most profitable company of the city, recording a politician, or working on a high-profile production, and the contract would still often read as a temporary or freelance contract. These contracts frequently can't even guarantee a long-term stable salary, employee benefits, a consistent schedule or even the existence of another job. You are left at the mercy of what a manager decides is a luxury to pay you for, and that is if they don't make it seem as if working for them is more important than paying you.

A great majority of my peers who are not working in Marketing, seem to also be in this same situation. Yes, they have work. Yes, they earn money. Yes they arrive aberrantly late at home (something your parents would like to see!), yes, they travel across the city filming corporate activations, events, or political campaigns. But the pay, the lack of benefits, and the instability make those positions feel indistinguishable from working in freelance.

I assume the same applies to many positions on marketing and social media fields as well. At my last job, all of my coworkers and I were technically under freelance contracts. We couldn't use the footage for personal projects, which was understandable, but we also had no severance pay, no social benefits, no insurance, and no employment protections. We had to pay for everything ourselves. The only genuinely positive aspect was the relatively high salary.

If you genuinely want to work in independent filmmaking, I would recommend that you start looking for as many local projects as you can and try to join other people's productions. Of course, starting your own project from scratch is also an option, but I would usually recommend the former as a first experience, whether you are currently studying Film or not.

There is a big difference between saying that I don't recommend completing a degree before you start doing this and saying that a Film degree has no use or value whatsoever. Of course it has value. It can open doors here and there, and you will meet and gradually build connections that can help you tremendously later in your career. But we also have to recognize that there is a group of enthusiasts who want to study Film specifically to work in productions that are actually related to cinema. As I mentioned before, those opportunities seem almost nonexistent in my home country, or are at the very least extremely difficult to get off the ground.

Outside of the marketing and sales and the willingness to go freelancing, you will be recording and editing pretty much anything under the sun. Among the most common gigs, weddings, quinceañeras, concerts, expos, clips for candidates and politicians, trade shows, charity events, online courses or seminars, podcasts, festivals, conferences, real estate property tours, drone footage (of everything I just listed), youtube channels, music videos and vlogs.

Even when you leave the marketing agency field, you will discover that most of these gigs are still within the ecosystem of branding and online presence.

One good thing about freelancing is that, in many of these gigs, you can apply your own creative eye and vision and offer it directly to a client. With the help of your portfolio, I would showcase the wide range of styles, visual approaches, and storytelling techniques I had depending on the event and the vision the client ultimately wanted to achieve.

It often becomes a matter of what you can do, what you can propose, how flexible you are with your ideas your time, and what the client is willing to accept. In some cases, they may want a strict and specific style that you can easily replicate, which can actually be the easiest part of the job. And you also pretty much learn to make your portfolio more versatile the more projects and events you attend to.

But all of this, of course, arrives to the fact that one point, the client will ask first for your portfolio before your degree. They will ask about your creative vision and your previous real gigs, not the paper nor the projects you did at university.

Clients may admire the final result and, at best, pay you what your work is actually worth, but they will not necessarily admire everything you did to acquire that knowledge in the first place. You may own expensive equipment, possess technical knowledge, develop refined creative judgment, and spend long hours on production, only to discover that most clients will still value your work according to what they think a side gig should cost rather than what your profession, expertise, or the gear you brought to the job should command.

And before you realize it, independently if you like it or not, your life and income will be suddenly be dependent of this undervalued system.

You can negotiate, you can demand your prices, but you will also have to accept that this is now a required step of the job.

You can increase your prices and aim for bigger productions, employ many social games to acquire clients and create a powerful network of endless gigs, this would obviously take more than hard work; and some people have managed to make their artistic vision their own brand. You (🫵) can too be that person, but at that point, we would be talking less about the expectancies of landing anything under filmmaking and more about the formula of finding the right people, the right opportunities at the right time, to get the right job, which is the formula that can easily produce success in almost any other profession.

For everyone else, however, success usually means simply landing a gig before the monthly bills do. And believe it or not, everything is a temporary season, including your most successful one. Reading through many testimonies on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, everyone conclude that there will be days where you will be accepting nearly every project that comes just to simply to keep money coming in regardless of the final pay.

Because that's also another issue about freelancing for life, nothing is guaranteed, nothing is constant. You can argue that this is just the reality with the current unstable job market, but does knowing that really make the uncertainty easier to live with?

You will probably have enough work on one or two seasons to comfortably pay your bills and even save some money for better equipment. But you cannot be assured that the next month will be the same, you can and will eventually ran out of gigs even with your regular clients. A large part of your week will now have to be spent convincing clients to take on smaller projects (and wait eternally for a response), accepting lower rates, or searching for any opportunity that can generate income.

And all of this won't matter how flexible you become in the freelancing field. You can film, photograph, edit, manage productions, operate drones, organize shoots and still not find enough gigs to be comfortable with your gains. You need to build your network of clients fast.

You cannot afford the luxury of specializing on any field of this career and expect to only find gigs about that one singular type of job because that doesn't exist in neither Freelancing or in actual jobs. Imagine telling a Biochemistry student that they will eventually need to branch into Astrophysics just to secure a very needed second source of income, actually, you may not be able to imagine this discrepancy between professions because being a jack of trades within the career has been so normalized that thinking you can specialize in one task or branch of study within the career is already considered a disadvantage.

Many of my peers despite of what I just said still thrive in the field and have lots of plan to aim higher than what they currently work on, it is incredibly tiresome, but it's still doable and admiring.

For me, I had recently stopped asking myself how I could survive in the industry and what I needed to focus on to become as successful as many of my peers. I am no longer wondering whether I should move to another state to pursue production opportunities or attend events and festivals for purely networking purposes. I no longer have the patience of opening Premiere Pro and spend hours trimming footage for 5 hours of my day.

Because after only three years of working in fields adjacent to the industry, where anything resembling filmmaking in the traditional sense of movies or television barely existed, I realized that my problem wasn't a lack of success or effort. I didn't see myself failing because I couldn't find immediate opportunities. The problem was that I no longer wanted what the majority of the industries in the career were offering.

A Stronger Emotion

This section is considerably more personal than the rest of the article. You may not relate to the conclusions I reached and that is perfectly fine.

I was in my third year of university, on set recording a short film for our final project. I was managing the light and cables, listening to the directors so I could stay ahead of the next scene. I had a few ideas about how I wanted to move the lighting around the room in the next scene to avoid yet another further delay. It was already dawn, so we had to hurry up finish the last shot and pack up the rented equipment.

And while I was holding a reflective mirror, I began to doubt, about my career. Not that I didn't liked being Staff for lighting, nor that I wasn't interested in the story for this production, rather, it was something that engulfed the entire career.

I wouldn't blame it in whatever problem I had that day or the fact that we had already been recording for ten hours straight. It was a sudden and puzzling reflection of how I felt with pretty much everything that had come before it. This was our first full-scale production, we had voted on who would take on each role, we held storyboard meetings, reviewed budgets and financial documents and gone out of our way to rent equipment from a local store on the other side of the town, we also had to spent large sums of money to make this short film possible.

We had condensed so many moving parts of this short film to have everyone acting in their role as much as they would like to which also included me. But why I still didn't feel accomplished at all?

Well, first of all, the short film was never edited or published because no one could handle the enormous HDR 4K footage recorded from the Blackmagic camera, so that demoralized me quite a bit because it meant no one on the team would be able to use the project in their future portfolio.

Second, I realized that I had started to despise nearly every diplomatic conversation and choice that took place from pre-production to all the way the moment we wrapped filming. I understood why everything had to be this way, but I was also mad because it was the only way. Compared to anything outside of filmmaking, everything here had to be discussed, approved or negotiated with someone else because even the slightest amount of miscommunication could ruin either a scene, a day of recording, or the entire production. Everyone is forced to be involved in the role of someone else one way or another.

I was never afraid of working in large groups. I knew how to deal with lazy people who contributed nothing to a project. I was usually the one managing the project, often with the help of many women teammates whom I greatly appreciated. I was the teammate who would send you a message asking for your assigned part of the project. I was never afraid to be abrasive or honest whenever I felt something was wrong. I had always been comfortable working in teams.

I wouldn't say I was burnt out from doing so many group projects by that point. I remained vocal during storyboard meetings and helped simplifying the technical requirements of certain scenes. Even a couple of semesters later, I was still the same person who naturally gravitated toward managing group projects.

I intentionally chose the role of Gaffer in this production because I could see how enthusiastic many of my classmates were about the more sought after positions such as director, cinematographer, or sound engineer. I did not feel the need to compete for those roles because I genuinely wanted to be the Gaffer. I enjoyed managing the lights, I performed well in the role, I never had any serious altercations with anyone and even received praise from a few colleagues here and there.

But when this doubt first came to me, I thought I was simply discovering that I preferred solitary work. I did not consider it a larger problem at first. I still tolerated working in teams, and I assumed I would eventually find smaller production houses or choose to work with fewer people. After all, my main frustration did not come from an inability to work with others, but from the fact that everything had to be communicated, discussed, and approved by a large group of people.

Which only made things more confusing later on. I was quite bothered by the fact that most jobs I found online seemed to require you to be a one-man operation, but I was also annoyed by the idea of finding myself in a larger production group where every aspect of a production had to be discussed collectively. It was rather frustrating that I wasn't liking anything about both sides.

Everything seemed to be going well. I thought that maybe I was simply going through a phase of burnout. But unfortunately, that doubt continued to occupy a corner of my mind for quite some time, and it eventually lead to other realizations that would influence many of the decisions I would make in the career much later on.

I also began to wonder whether working in this career, alone, as part of a team, or even on my own terms, was truly worth the effort and the sacrifices demanded by the industry if the result of it was merely entertainment, brand work, or a creative idea watered down by executives. I do like entertainment, but I wouldn't make it my entire life about it, and it grieves me to have realized this late.

It was disappointing to feel so apathetic and disillusioned about the industry so early in my career.

As I spent more time reflecting on these doubts, I realized that I was becoming increasingly drawn to other activities that had very little to do with entertainment or creative production. I could see a genuine interest in other areas, and I began wondering even more whether they might actually be more realistic options for me than production.

In a way, I chose production not because I had an endless passion for it, but because I was simply relatively good at it. But now that I have gone through the cycle and burned myself out on it, the only thing left for me to do is endure it forever, or eventually take the wild option of doing something completely different.

I never really had, nor do I have, the interest to "start a project from scratch" or to produce a short film entirely on my own. Not because I believe I wouldn't be able to finish it or because I suffer from some eternal form of impostor syndrome, but because I would feel as though I were forcing myself through every step of the production process just because I enrolled in film. I would much rather create stories through other mediums and deal with the stress that comes with those processes than go through the process of film production itself.

I continue working in branding and I am currently employed on a non-social-media-heavy production house, it is comfier, more akin to what I studied for.

I know these doubts will continue influencing my decisions within the industry and I know it is relatively late to switch to something else. I would probably in the next five years, attempt to switch to something else, but right now, I would rather stay on something that isn't stressing, chaotic and most importantly, uncertain.

For most of my peers, it seems that most of these doubts don't exist, sometimes you can see it on their eyes this is the career they will probably remain eager to work on, which is something that bothers me the most. It was understanding that I can't convince myself to keep working on the most common field the career can offer.

If building a career in filmmaking meant having my work live primarily on social media, then it also meant immersing myself in that ecosystem. I would have to dedicate my life to the one field I had grown to dislike the most. A field that I firmly believe it amplifies the worst of us for nothing but internet traffic.

And to what end? Marketing disguised as authenticity? An advertisement for a scam product? Promoting an over-the-top influencer? A mediocre film designed to satisfy everyone and challenge no one? Propaganda?

Why would I turn my creativity into something that only sells, persuades, or captures attention before the current attention span breaks?

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The worst part about enrolling in Film, or any other career, is realizing that it is not what you expected it to be, regardless of how much you thought you understood its shortcomings beforehand, because there will be thousand more once you're working about it. None of the usual difficulties surprised me before enrolling. I had been warned about the long hours, the uncertainty and the unstable income that came with filmmaking.

At one point, I even convinced myself that I could remain within the industry's more technical side by working in inventory management and equipment maintenance. In fact, becoming a technical specialist was probably one of the reasons I was drawn to filmmaking in the first place. I even recently considered looking for jobs in the area. But I am also so, sickened, by my chosen career in general.

So, after two successful and really chaotic years of my previous job. I quit my job.

Would I consider this career, these six years of my life as a failure? Absolutely not. If anything I would consider it a success. I put all of my effort and my best to make sure every short film, small project, commercial, podcast, conference was spectacular. I am still proud of eighty nine percent of the final results I've delivered to clients.

I will be forever grateful for the opportunities, contracts, and chances that many of my peers have given me throughout the years. They allowed me not only to work alongside them, but also to collaborate with brands, events, and people who, regardless of the common shortcomings and headaches. I don't think I could ever fully repay them for those opportunities in any way.

But at least for now, I would rather do something else other than writing vague briefs for audience growth.

Retrospective About Studying Filmmaking

One of the best things to know before enrolling in a Film degree is finding out that, depending in your case, it is something totally optional to pursue.

If you truly want to be involved in filmmaking, work on high profile productions, TV shows, advertising campaigns, visual effects, 3D animation, social media content, or even alongside the directors and creatives that young people are admiring nowadays, remember that this will depend far more on your portfolio, willpower and your networking skills than only having your degree.

If you want to join the freelancing world, then you're in so much better luck, because that also doesn't require a degree.

You are also more likely to meet the right people through film festivals, concerts, contests, clubs, online communities, and industry events. You will learn many of the skillsets that matter most on the industry through courses, seminars, experimentation, actual work and a genuine personal interest in it. You will achieve, learn and connect more on your own than from a university program alone.

This effort and success must come from you. At no point should you assume that a university will provide the tools, luck, opportunities, or, most importantly, the motivation needed to move forward in your career. It may give you some contacts and a few gigs, but it will never give you the willpower required to push through the industry setbacks, uncertainty, and competition. That part can only come from you.

#career #english #posts