4thWall

On September 1st I will have been out here in LA for 3 months, and I will have spent about 2 of those 3 months trying to find PA work. I spent my first month or so trying to start up a mentorship with a director of photography, every week I emailed him, he said he was out of town, email him next week, so I did, still out of town. This went on for awhile until it reached a point where it just wasn’t going to happen, he was too busy, and he passed my name around to some of his DP friends. Having lost about 5 weeks of my time out here to trying to start up a mentorship I switched over to just getting work, not a mentorship or an internship but paying (hopefully) PA work. So how did I go about this? I occasionally skimmed through craigslist, mandy.com, realitystaff.com, and some other sites. But I think I applied for one job I found through these sites and didn’t get the job. Since I haven’t been actively using websites to find a job, my method for finding PA work has been to just meet with people. Every week I try (it doesn’t always happen) to have a meeting with a Newhouse or even a VPA alum. I have met with DP’s/camera operators, producers,  a special effects coordinator and a post production director. So I’ve met with some people, but how did I set up those meetings? Well, I email or call them, say hey I got your contact info from so and so, they said you would be a great person to look to for advice on finding PA work and if they are available I’d love to meet with them. Something like that has been working for me. What sort of advice has come out of these meetings? Work for free, it gets you experience and gets you contacts. Look on craigslist and other entertainment job websites. Stay on people’s radar, if you worked for them once, remind them you exist every once in a while. Stay connected with your classmates because they may hear about job openings where they work. When you’re first starting out, if you have little to no experience put your school projects on your resume, but as you start to get work, bump those off.

In my TV Research class when we were doing focus groups we learned then when you reach a point of saturation, where your focus groups are starting to repeat themselves, then you don’t need to carry out anymore focus groups to supplement your research. I think I have reached the point of saturation with my meetings. I am now hearing the same thing over and over again on how to get PA work. But am I going to stop having meetings? No. You should never stop building connections, no matter how many times you hear that you should work for free, when you really can’t afford to work for free nor do you really want to, you still continue to meet with people. Why? Because as useful as every persons advice may be, I’m not actually meeting with them because I want their advice, I mean I do, but, that is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to meet with them, find a way to connect with them, impress them, make them believe I’m an able bodied hard worker (because I am), get them to like me, and have them get me a PA job. Do they know that I want a job more than their advice? Most likely yes, but do I go into the meeting acting like I want a job more than I want their advice, NO!

As many meeting’s as I have had, I don’t know if I have mastered the meeting, I haven’t really gotten any work out of any of them, so maybe I am doing something wrong, or maybe these people just don’t have any work for me, who knows. Regardless, here is my take on having a successful meeting. Remember, you are just meeting with this person for their advice, this is not a job interview, so don’t dress like it is, but still look nice. Tell them what you want to do, and what you’ve done already. Get them to talk about themselves and what they did to get first jobs. Always act interested even though you could care less. You can only talk about how to get PA work for so long before things start to get awkward because you’ve ran out of questions and they begin to repeat themselves, so I think one of the best things you can do is to just try to have a meaningful and stimulating conversation with them. This is where you are going to make a connection and show them that you are capable of more than just asking simple questions and nodding and saying “yeah” as they are talking to you. After you have met with this person, follow up, tell them how nice it was to meet them and that you really appreciate them taking the time to meet with you. If they ask for your resume they will most likely say that they will pass it along to someone in production or something like that, and to check back with them in a week if you haven’t heard from them. Don’t be afraid to feel like you are nagging them if you don’t hear from them, they are busy people, and they mean it when they say check back with them. I think the most important thing you want to accomplish after meeting someone is to be the person who’s name comes to mind when they need a PA, or when one of their friends asks them if they know of any PA’s. So don’t just meet with someone and hope one day you will hear back from them, stay fresh in their mind, because eventually they or someone they know will need a PA.

That is the advice I have for now on my road to PA work, I will post more later on PA work that I have actually gotten and continue to share what I am learning.

Adrienne