A peek into the Film Production Office
Written by Daniella Garcia. Photo courtesy of SCAD
“Particularly in film, coming out of college our professors always preach that the first people you’re going to be working in the industry with are the people that you worked with in school,” said Sean Hussey, junior film and television student and supervising manager of the SPO. Created and developed as an incredible resource for students within the film and entertainment arts to connect with crews and projects, the SCAD Production Office has triumphantly taken off, and is ready to lead as one of the primary resources students can use in the production process.
Whether you’re a senior planning your thesis film and looking for crew or a freshman new to the department with little to no experience, the SPO encourages all students to sign up and create an account with the office’s website, and welcomes a variety of projects and majors to explore all the office has to offer.
With about 60+ projects currently listed on the site, the office is in the process of outreaching to more departments, particularly production design, sound design, VFX, animation and more. It’s evident that they’re excited to expand their resources as much as possible.
Hussey shared his insight on the ways the SPO serves students from behind the scenes: “For us, it’s a communication tool. Similar to how the casting office connects actors, it’s our role to connect crew members with projects and vice versa, really with the end goal of making more connections happen at SCAD. One of our biggest emphasis as a group is to share and promote student collaboration, and it really roots back to that.
When this was started a few years ago before COVID, we wanted to offer a platform where students could find more work. We found that there was a real issue of crews not finding enough team members and students constantly looking for work with no success because there weren’t enough avenues of communication available.
So to have something that is officially through SCAD, funded by SCAD and run by SCAD students to serve as a platform where people can connect and meet each other to not only fill up crews, but make longer lasting personal and professional relationships, is really the core of what our office does on a day to day basis.”
Julia Moran, a fellow junior film and television major, producer of senior thesis film ‘Vagabond,’ and now intern, shared her experiences going through the website as an applicant early on. “We started crewing for Vagabond about halfway through fall quarter, and we were looking for a lot––it was just the director and I at first. So we were trying to get a stacked crew.
Slowly but surely it started coming through on the website. It was still pretty new, I would say, but I thought ‘This is a great resource, we might as well just use it to what we can,’ and through that got a lot of applications, which were all coming in by email, so we had great contact between the team in the office as well as all the applicants. We saw the versatility of it and knew it’d be a good opportunity for us as producers and students.”
So whether you’re looking for your next crew or eager to join one, take the first step and sign up on the SPO’s website by clicking here, or stop by the office located at the Savannah Film Studios, 11-5 p.m. Monday through Friday!
