I received a call from my internship supervisor: “Hey, would you like to go on a film shoot and work backstage? We need a publicist for one short film.”
As I work with a film distribution company and my primary focus is working with the films after they have been produced, this was a somewhat unexpected offer, however, I could not reject it. Seeing the filmmaking process from the inside has been my dream since I started working with this company, but I did not think such a big responsibility would be given to me just 2 months into the internship.
I assumed I already knew everything that needed to be known within my internship duties: how to plan a social media post, how to communicate with stakeholders, how to write creative texts, and how to design press kits. Now suddenly I had a ton of new questions: What is a publicist? What do they do? Who do they need to interview? What kind of questions do they ask? How to start?.. While my internship supervisor has helped me with answering most of these questions, the stress combined with excitement about the upcoming challenge did not leave my head the following week before the actual shooting.
I needed to coordinate the behind-the-scenes photography, videography and interviews. The latter was the most stressful part of all, as it appeared that the cast for the film consists of a couple of well-known actors, some of whom I remember from early childhood. I just moved back to my home country to do an internship and now I am gonna interview a person that I used to watch on TV as a child?
During the first day of the shoot, the stress on my face was inevitable. It was a student project, which should be something that made this experience easier for me. However, all of these students went to the film academy together, walking the same corridors and sitting at the same canteen. And here I was – a girl that no one had seen before, that just moved back from Amsterdam where she was studying something that doesn’t even make sense linguistically when translated into Lithuanian*. I did not feel very included or maybe it was the strict and focused faces of everyone that made me feel that way. That is why for the first interviews that I needed to do, I completely lost any of my abilities to communicate. I have therefore organized a different person to ask the actors the questions that I have prepared. Thankfully, during that day I made a couple of friends, and when I went on set again I was far more confident in this environment, and have made over 4 interviews with the cast and crew all by myself.
This experience has taught me two very important lessons. Firstly, stress can be very stagnating and most often does not give good results. Finding a way to relax can most certainly improve work quality. Secondly, networking is crucial, it has a direct effect on comfort within the workplace. Knowing the people you work with makes it so much easier to express thoughts and ideas and take action more confidently. This is why I would advise always looking out for relevant people within the industry before even the start of the internship.
*Communication Science does not translate well to Lithuanian, as the words ‘study’ and ‘science’ are the same words, so many people assume I am studying ‘Communication Study’.