
Remember that applying to crew jobs requires the same professionalism as any other profession: submit with every application a polished résumé and cover letter, both of which should make clear you’re looking for PA work.Īnother route to landing production assistant jobs is via internships and trainee programs. If you’re serious about rising from a production assistant to an industry professional, Los Angeles, New York City, and Atlanta are where you want to be for the best opportunities. Bookmark sites that post the kinds of jobs you’re looking for and check them regularly. But depending on your location, projects should be easy to find, especially with the advent of job boards like Backstage and Mandy, and social media groups like Film Production & Jobs and Paid Film/TV Production Jobs: Los Angeles Area. Production teams rely heavily on recommendations and networking when it comes to hiring PAs. Postproduction assistants: This person helps the professionals who organize and finish the project after filming.
Production assistant movie#
Production assistant series#
Field production assistants: This person works during the shooting of a film or series and is sometimes assigned to a specific department.No matter what department, they all need PAs.” Different Types of Production Assistantsĭepending on the production size, there are three main types of PAs: If you start as a then that’s the baseline for breaking in as a crew person. “Personally, I’ve had a wide variety of odd jobs, from office work to making sure that shipments go out on time to just plain old sweeping. “When someone calls ‘all hands on deck!’ those are the hands that arrive,” according to Kaitlin Cornell, a PA for Marvel Entertainment. They regularly bounce between the production’s numerous departments and have the opportunity to wear many different hats on a set-if the art department needs a hand dressing the set, the PA becomes a set dresser if the costume department has an assortment of clothes that needs labeling, the PA jumps over to that job. Put another way, he production assistant is on set to do whatever is needed in the moment that other crew members don’t have the capacity to worry about.

A PAs job can include moving equipment, managing background actors, escorting actors to and from their trailers, delivering hard drives of footage to editors, handing out scripts and shooting schedules, organizing paperwork, cleaning up the set, and taking coffee orders, among other things. A production assistant provides support on set where it's needed, doing a a huge variety of tasks throughout a shoot.
