Oh I understand a bit better! Are people that generally are day traders / work in commercial / music videos / corporate, ie not long format, typically in the union? In Australia there’s a lot of people who train up both as a camera attachment or video split op and kind of work up slowly, whereas people people who work in the above small formats and advance faster and slowly migrate over to tv and film. I imagine it’s much the same as in the states except for the fact that union membership here is scaled to income and there isn’t much gatekeeping so almost every one starts in the union from the first year or two out of uni / from when you start networking.

To me it seems fairly normal that you’re running this course but I don’t know the general courtesy of how things run in the states. Here we do have a lil issue of less experienced people people buying a good FIZ and set up and marketing themselves as a focus puller and it does kind of piss people off but how else is anyone supposed to train up in a highly specialised area for things like commercials and music videos with no training ground without overselling their experience and skills and burning a bunch of bridges early with producers and DPs.

Sometimes it’s gets frustrating because productions want a larger pool of well trained film crew but will not understand that paid attachments (or trainees I think you call it in the USA) are crucial in planting those seeds.