All they need is some Arri-branded workwear and it’ll look like they’re shooting the next Bond movie. By Pexels user Samuel Nay.Soon it will be spring, and the air will be filled with the sound of birdsong and people trying to get lawnmowers to start. This also means that many of the world’s film students should by now be deep into pre-production for their graduation films. It’s only a matter of time, then, until anyone who owns or manages equipment (or runs a location, or acts) will start receiving hesitant phone calls from desperate wannabes suffering from a profound case of budget-ambition mismatch.

It’s long been a hobby of the high end to mock people with a dented Bolex and mood boards full of Marvel movies, but let’s be fair. The attitude of the established film business to new entrants has often varied anywhere between callous indifference and, when work is scarce, barely-suppressed hostility, and work is currently scarce. Job protectionism is a dubious attitude for a business which relies so heavily on freelancers, especially one which faced a crisis of staffing just a few years ago because it had been so reluctant to train people.

Since then, demand has changed, to put it mildly, which leaves the class of 2025 potentially facing the scorn of incumbents and graduating into a practically post-apocalyptic work environment. Okay, it’s both hilarious and informative to chuckle about a desperately earnest postgrad who’s decided that her stop motion short can only be properly served by four months alone in a room with an Alexa 65 and a set of DNAs. Still, there’s always room for someone to lead such a person gently to the realisation that if Aardman can crank out popular claymation on DSLRs, then so can anyone else… who has forty miniature stages and crew to fill them.

This is why the industry’s has a long-established propensity to tell beginners that it’s not about the toys. For the benefit of students reading this, that’s never been more true. The thing is, filmmaking is usually too expensive an artform to pursue for its own sake. If the ulterior motive isn’t profit, it’s the promotion of the filmmaker, which doesn’t have much to do with either the equipment or the quality of the results; it’s based largely on who the work was done for.

Six-figure students

Either way, let’s not be the Big Rental employee who picks up calls from students with an audible sigh of exasperation, even if we’re the last lonely and overworked individual in the kit room of a desperately pressurised business. It doesn’t help that these calls tend to come in flocks during the week assignments are handed out.

To some extent, the reticence of rental managers is understandable: the likelihood of any particular film student becoming a major source of revenue for a rental facility is microscopic. We graduate orders of magnitude more cinematography MAs than there are dead men’s boots to fill, even assuming they all turn out to be the reincarnation of Alcott. Even creatively, it’s hardly likely that anyone’s first ambitious short will meaningfully showcase the difference between one six-figure lens set and another.

The thing is, most film students know all this, even if it isn’t a popular topic for discussion in the university cafeteria. Most people learn early that talent as a director of photography will usually shine through technical limitations. Most people already know that locations and production design cost more than camera gear, and crew cost more than camera gear, and the best sensor in the world will struggle to make up for a lack of either.

Desiccated skeleton

As so often, two things can be true at once, and sometimes there is no solution but to accept things are less than ideal, and to engage with the process anyway. Within reason, film students shouldn’t object to pulling last year’s camera out of a dusty closet, and, within reason, rental managers shouldn’t object to helping them do that. Both parties should be clear on the fact that filmmaking is a team sport, and that the warm bodies are far spendier than the hardware.

Students should plan something simple and do it well, as opposed to trying for the next Transformers and being discovered, months later, as a desiccated skeleton propped up in front of a playlist of Blender tutorials. SImilarly, incumbent professionals should endeavour not to get too grumpy about the new entrant’s starry-eyed insistence that only the best will do. It’s easy to be mean, especially given that the world of work is likely to treat beginners meanly enough in 2025.

No need to skewer the padawan’s self-confidence too severely, eh?