Chasing The Hollywood Dream

Hi.  My name is Josh.  I Make Movies.  And I’ve been working in the Film Industry for the last 5 Years.

My area of expertise is in post-production, specifically Editing.  I spent four years studying it in film school before moving to Los Angeles.  I chose editing because I knew that’s where the jobs were, and because I was good at it.  Sure enough, I found work here, in my area of study (editing), and have been busy ever since.

My goal, and my dream, over the last 5 years has always been the same: Work On Movies.  The Big Ones.  Star Wars.  Star Trek.  I could go on, but you get the idea.  That is my dream, and my patience was tested.  Over the years, I accepted many different types of editing / post-production jobs at many different companies, most notably Reality Television.  That’s the secret to how I paid my bills as I continued to search for the jobs I really wanted but could never find.  I hated Reality, and I was loosing hope.  I was starting to doubt whether I would ever find the job of my dreams.  Then, finally, Destiny came knocking in my greatest time of need…

Through a connection from my old film school, I was offered my very first opportunity on a big budget feature film, called The Great Wall, at the major film company, Legendary.  If only I had found this job all those years ago when I first moved to LA, but it took me all this time to build the strong network of contacts needed to get here.

The secret to finding these jobs is WHO you know, not WHAT you know.  That’s it.  It’s that simple.  If you don’t KNOW someone who works on these types of movies, you’ll very likely NEVER find a way in.  I spent years looking for jobs on online job websites (Entertainment Careers, StaffMeUp, etc.), only to discover I was looking in the wrong places, and going about it completely wrong.  What I learned is I needed to reach out to specific PEOPLE, via their direct email addresses, in order to start finding these types of opportunities.  Once I started doing that, and changing my approach to how I found work, the opportunities started coming.

I have learned so much on my path to getting here, and I’ll share more of that in many blog posts to come, but for now I’ll leave it at that.

Want to work in the film industry?  Making the move to LA?  Don’t know anyone?  Learn from my 5 years of trial and errors, and save yourself the time: DON’T apply to online job ads (unless you are ok with getting trapped in the never ending circle of Reality Television and / or Trailer House and / or Internet Video jobs), and start REACHING OUT to as many people who work on the types of big Movies and / or TV Shows as you possibly can.  How do you find their emails, you might ask?  Good question.  The answer is IMDB Pro.  No, it’s not free, but for $20 per month, it’s worth it, to start opening doors to your career.

 

A New Beginning.

Today marks the launch of my new blog site.  I am very excited to share some of my thoughts and experiences with the world, as the early years of my professional career unfold.  Please join me in my journey as a filmmaker, and come back to visit every now and then for updates!

Though this post is called “A New Beginning”, it is really a new chapter of an older beginning that started just about five years ago, when I graduated film school and moved to LA to join the film industry.  Since then I have already come a long way, working in post-production at over a dozen different film and television production companies, meeting awesome people, learning new tricks in my craft, joining the lingo of LA lifestyle, and more.  But the journey has only just begun, and the best is yet to come.

Here’s to the future!