A (Cine)Magical experience

Introduction

            In this blog post I will be reflecting on my experience of working with Cinemagic before, during and after their festival. The blog will focus on three significant challenges I faced and will once again use Burton’s reflective modal, as the formula has been so successful for structuring my previous reflections.

Pre-festival work

            What happened? After securing a position with CineMagic back in July my first task was to compile a database of 186 nearby schools, their addresses, their contact details and who was best to approach with related projects. This was my first job and I knew I had to do it as well to make a good impression.

            So what I did was I began searching up every school, location and made a timeline for completion of the project. A challenge I faced was many of the schools purposely didn’t have details of their staff or clear methods of correspondence. To get this information I tried emailing and following up but this didn’t work. However, this was very tedious work and worst still I have no experience at cold calling people over the phone as such I was very nervous to call them and ended up putting off calling the missing schools off till I was approaching my self-imposed deadline.

            Now what I ended up doing to alleviate this issue was to practice cold calling friends and practice starting conversations, while simple it boosted my confidence enough to call a few which went well so I ended up calling more and more. Many were hostile, some refused still to give details but I ended up hitting my deadline.  

            So when it came to doing a similar database for community centres across NI I had the skills and confidence to achieve my objectives quickly and effectively. This is a skill I’m so happy I have now and will serve me well for the rest of my professional life.

During

            What happened during the festival was a lot of learning and fun, difficult work. There wasn’t a specific issue but there was a lot to learn about how one runs a screening. Over the festival, I pushed myself to take on greater and greater responsibility for operating and showing films. However, to achieve this goal I had to familiarise myself with the operating procedure and front of house skills.  

            So what I had to do was learn intuitively as others executed roles I aspired to do as such I observed how people worked and mimicked them until I developed my own style. This approach was good however in hindsight this approach limited me, in that, I was only able to be as good as those I was watching.

            Now what I’ve leant from this is that learning from watching is only a viable strategy when one is observing experts in a field. Luckily this was the case for me, however, it prevented me from truly excelling as I was only ever as good as my contemporaries who I learnt from. In future, I should pair an observational approach with additional research and personal development in order to stand out. This process developed my practical work skills.

Below are a selection of photos I took for the festival.

Post festival

            What happened after the festival was I continued to work with CineMagic as they are a well-connected interesting company with big goals whose objectives to inspire and motivate young audiences through the medium of film is something I passionately believe in. Currently, I am running screenings as part of the On The Pulse Festival and have worked on their short film Impossible as a covid officer/ runner. Finally, I have been accepted onto the ScreenSkills mentoring program run by CineMagic.  

            So what has challenged me in these Impossible was handling the rigours of a professional shoot while balancing university workload. Impossible was a paid 5-day shoot as such I needed to be working at 100% at all times to add as much value to set as possible. We were called to set at 6/7am and I had to get a 1hr taxi so I was on average waking up at 4:30/5:30 am. This was exhausting long hours of intensive work with little sleep, as such my work began to dip in quality.

            Now what I realised by the third day is that this was unsustainable. My work was slipping and my health was taking a hit. I needed to utilise my available resources to mitigate the difficulties I was facing; namely the lack of sleep. I was getting home in the evening and having to make food, as I couldn’t do so the night before or morning of, this took a lot of time and energy which would have better been used relaxing and sleeping. So I began to eat larger breakfasts and lunches and take a Tupperware container with me so I could bring the leftover food back home for me in the evening this allowed me to get home, eat quickly and recharge. This problem-solving resource optimisation experience has elevated many aspects of my approach to filmmaking.

Overall reflection

            What happened over my work experience has allowed me to do is further develop this professional relationship and help slightly break into the NI film landscape.

            So what I believe is that this experience has set me up well to deal with the challenging issue of finding work post-university.

            Now what I learned cannot be summed up in 1000 words and the impact that facing and overcoming these and the myriad of other challenges had and will continue to have cannot be expressed.