Industry Troughs & Alternatives

Over half way through the year, heading into summer, and where has all the work gone?

With _The Hobbit _shooting wrapped up in Wellington and the Spartacus series having come to an end, there must be a heck of a lot of unemployed screen production workers out there right now, including myself. We all know that’s the nature of the business, on again off again, but it somehow feels like we’re settling into quite a large trough without much in sight. Of course it is good to have a rest sometimes, but let’s hope the rest doesn’t last too long. Hopefully there will be projects coming into production over the summer months, but I suspect that many of us will be looking for alternative work opportunities. I guess it’s fortunate that we film workers are an innovative bunch and can turn our hands to many tasks.

A shame there’s not more work in the surveillance business as it seems to be an area our current Government is keen to expand. Why is it that governments, even governments in the so called Western democracies, are so keen to access information about their citizens’ activities but when one of their citizens, like Edward Snowdon, accesses a government’s information the government gets most upset? ‘We, your elected representatives, want to know what you’re up to, but we don’t want you to know what we’re up to, no way.’

Quite frankly I think all the terrorism scare mongering is mainly just that, scare mongering. Sure there are crazy people out there in the world who are prepared to do crazy things but I see these as acts of madness as much as they’re acts of terrorism. A building full of clothing factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed killing over a thousand people. Now that is a truly terrible occurrence and something that we in the Western world can help avoid happening in the future with very little effort or expense. What’s more, without any need for espionage whatsoever, by insisting that workers employed to make clothes for western clothing companies are given decent working conditions and a say in the way things are done in their places of work. I gather there is already a push in this direction by some of the companies which commission work from Dhaka.

Since working on Gaylene Preston’s Hope and Wire project in Christchurch earlier this year (coming to a television set near you in September), I’ve done a stint filling in as a digital media studies tutor at the Southern Institute of Technology (SIT) in Invercargill. I’ve had a bit of an ongoing relationship with SIT which I’m happy to continue because I do enjoy the interaction with the students but also because there is a zero-fees policy at SIT, which is the way education should be in my opinion. I can’t see any practical benefits to a system which is designed to send young people out into the world and into the work force already burdened with debt. It seems to me the only beneficiaries of such a system are the banks. But I must admit I do have one qualm about the tutoring work, where are all the graduates of a media studies course going to find work? There are already hundreds of us in the industry wondering where and when our next paid employment will turn up. I suspect we’re going to start to see a real divide within our industry, both cultural and financial. With some being able to score work on Peter Jackson productions or other big-budget international productions when, and if, they come to New Zealand, but with many, if not most of us, working on super-low or no-budget productions. Graham Mason when talking with Kathryn Ryan on the radio recently suggested a three-tier structure … first is top-end, big-budget productions, then comes middle-ground (cultural, Kiwi film and TV) stuff and lastly low-end, shot-on-a-cell-phone or a ‘GoPro’ for the internet sort of stuff. It seems to me that the middle ground is steadily heading towards the low end, we’ve all noticed the ongoing squeeze on local film and television production budgets and TVCs.

We have a government which is keen to push big business and it seems to include a push towards more and more workers in more and more industries becoming contractors. This may be good for business in the short term but it creates uncertainty for regular folk trying to make their way through from week to week, and it allows for some people to be paid less than the minimum wage, something which happens all too frequently, even in our industry.

But some work is better than no work I guess. Fingers crossed some work comes along with the flush of summer.

Albol