Film is by far the biggest employer of artists in the world. But some of you don’t know that there is a department for tv storyboard. But there are no guarantees, no safety nets. The real art of film is not to make films; it’s to survive doing it.
If you want to make your living as an artist in the film industry, you can’t assume that making films will be your main job. There are plenty of other, more junior positions open to you, especially if you are young and inexperienced – but many of those jobs are also dangerous.
You can also try to do other things, but they will be hard to keep up with the pace of filmmaking.
New artists are often surprised by the number of career choices available to them. This is quite understandable, because they have no idea what their options might be. There are two reasons for this. One is that many people who spend their lives creating films do not consider themselves artists. They are just doing their job, and don’t see it as anything special.
The other reason is that there seem to be very few jobs as artists in the film industry as defined above. In particular, the creative people who make films do not work together as a team, but as individuals scattered across different departments. It is difficult to identify a single creative person who is responsible for a film’s overall look or feel, or even for its plot or story line.
In practice nobody works as a single creative person for a film’s entire life, and new ideas come from all kinds of different places. But the chances of finding a new way of making films happen only if you make films yourself, or know someone who does.
It’s easy to confuse a profession with a job. As long as you have a job you can do, there is no reason for it to be anything else. If you understand that film is a business, then it’s very clear what kind of job an artist in the film industry has.
If you are doing something really interesting, something worth doing, something that makes life more exciting, you will eventually find out that most people don’t want to pay you for it. You’ll learn not to take money from people who would rather not spend it on your work. You’ll also learn that other people are trying to tell you how they should spend their money, and they won’t always do so wisely.
If you decide to specialize in making movies about cats playing the piano, or other low-budget trifles, you can probably expect to be able to make your living at that for the rest of your career. You’ll just have to work hard at it.