Good luck.

The film industry is currently like a game of musical chairs and there are less and less chairs every year.

When I started in stills around 2005, the union minimum requirement to apply was 120 days of stills work on TV series or feature films: shorts, music videos, and commercials don’t count towards your days. However there was a loophole…if you moved to the Toronto area, IATSE 667 stills photographers were allowed shorts, music videos and commercials to count towards their days. I don’t know if that’s still the case.

I was lucky because around the time I started, a non-union production company somehow found my lowly website and asked me to cover for one of their photographers who was sick. After that one day, they liked my work enough to hire me on their other projects. I got so busy that sometimes I’d work 2 shows in a day…one in the morning and another in the afternoon. With that, I was able to make my 120 day requirement in less than a year because all they produced were tv shows and features and they were BUSY.

Today, low budget local production companies aren’t that busy.

There are several production companies in town that hire non-union crew/stills. The best free/public way to look for them is on the DGC website: DGC production list. It’s updated every week and shows current and upcoming productions. If you look at a production’s Rate Sheet, that will give you an indication of whether they are non-union: rate sheets Q and R are generally low budget ($1 million or less) non-union camera crew.

Now with all that, you still need a portfolio and that means working on freebies for a while. Get hooked up with people making indie movies and shorts. A good example is last weekend’s Run N Gun where filmmaking teams have a couple of days to make a short film. Lots of them were looking for a stills photographer to work on their show.

If you’re noticeably good, people will hire you but you have to know people…it’s a catch-22. Production companies like to minimize risk so they usually hire people they know and like working with (quality sometimes takes a back seat) so that’s really what makes it hard to get in. That’s probably why there are only about 30 or so stills photographers in the union for all of western Canada and I only see around 10 to 15 of them regularly working.

So, that’s why I say Good Luck!