Positioning Yourself for Opportunity

College happens. This is where self-discovery is meant to happen, so epiphanies came in like a tornado for me.

Freshman year (2011), I was enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Notable credits of graduates usually go straight to Jason Derulo, but I wanna shout out Matthew Sims, who was in school with me and has been on Broadway countless times. The talent! MY GAWWWDD. 😂

But anyways — I realized artists don’t get paid enough for their time.

I’d rather be someone who has eaten jerk chicken in Jamaica, had prosecco in Italy, and eaten, prayed, and loved through Southeast Asia. And even as a triple-threat actress, singer, and dancer, the pay wasn’t equivalent to the talent.

More importantly, I had no real concept of money — particularly how to build wealth by diversifying a portfolio, as they say. I was financially illiterate and addicted to spending.

SO, despite being professionally trained in the art of dance since I was 5 years old and dreaming of being a musical theatre Broadway actress living in New York and paying my dues, “starving artist” was no longer the dream or the honor I had glamorized it to be.

I thought I could stay close to the theater by getting a seasonal job.

Winter 2012, I became an usher at the Pantages Theater, aka the Broadway of Hollywood. My thought was that this would allow me to learn the front-of-house production side of theater.

Only to learn they really don’t make that much money either.

I remember talking to a senior sound engineer about his salary, how much he traveled, and how he had a wife and kids that he supported on this salary. It was about $60K.

He explained that the industry was so cheap, they’d often prefer to hire someone out of town for a tour at a lower salary versus paying a California-based resident sound engineer, whose salary was closer to $80K+.

So I was like, “I’m gonna pursue filmmaking because he said that’s where the real money is.”

And I thought, well, if this is where the “real money” is, then I want to understand the finances, every moving piece.

I don’t want to be someone who is well-educated in film history; I actually wanna practice making decisions, learning from mistakes, and understanding the proper financial practices to make a good product.

Because that is the reputation I want to have.

And the reason people want to work with me.

Networking with the sound engineer of Donny & Marie: Christmas in Los Angeles is how I discovered my WHY.

Finding My Way Into Film

First day of film school (2013), our teachers were brutally honest.

They were pretty much like, “Yeah, everyone wants to be a director, but the truth is less than half of you will work in the industry.”

THIS attitude from them motivated me tremendously because one thing I was dead set on was believing in myself.

And since my teachers weren’t actively working on projects that they could let me intern on, I would just have to grow my network organically — intentionally positioning myself around people who were actively working on projects that I could jump onto, like a commercial or music video shoot.

I was in school full-time, taking the maximum amount of credits to balance out the year I’d lost while majoring in musical theatre.

The first year of film school sucked, not gonna lie.

It was catered to directors, cinematographers, editors, and production design. Looking back, I’m glad I understand what they do, but I was most looking forward to junior-year classes, which were finally getting into production finance, legal and risk regulations, and all the juicy union stuff.

It was an interesting time because in 2012, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) joined with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).

As an aspiring producer, being in a class full of creatives provided a LOT of opportunities to act as someone’s producer because most of my classmates weren’t too interested in the logistics of paperwork, research, and developing an execution plan.

Eager to test whether anything I was learning in school actually translated to Hollywood sets, I decided to make LinkedIn my primary social media platform.

I was requesting people I had no business connecting with — VPs of studios, executives, people at top-tier production and studio houses — looking for opportunities to intern.

The value was that even though I didn’t know these executives, if they accepted my request, I was gaining access to their network. Other people would see that we were connected.

And this was BEFORE LinkedIn added the followers option.

It was either you’re in the circle or you’re not.

I found value in my LinkedIn connections because it just felt like a world of opportunity.

Not the scammy site it is today. 😂

From Office Intern to Set Intern

By 2013, I landed a position as an Office Manager intern that I found on LinkedIn for a production house called Dirty Robber.

I was hired by a woman named Maya Pocock, and I will never forget it.

I applied and within the hour she messaged me back for a phone interview.

We clicked right away.

I’d have a truly full-circle moment with the company 10 years later when I’d become the client under the work I was producing at Facebook.

I’d say the days I spent interning were more instrumental than film school because I got to see and listen to how important relationship-building is, how sensitive directors can be, and all the ways producers have to hand-hold them and baby-feed them feedback.

I got a front-row seat to the fragile parts of the creative artist ego and the art of managing client expectations.

It was both entertaining and enriching.

Eventually, I was bored with the office life.

I was ready to join the producers on set.

I just needed to get myself invited to a shoot on the production calendar that was outside my school hours.

So how did I go from office intern to set intern?

First, I asked my manager and made sure she was cool with me approaching some of our freelance producers.

She said, of course.

And then she hipped me to the fact that I didn’t need to approach the producers.

I should be approaching the production coordinators because they’re usually hiring and working closest with the interns and assistants.

BOOM!

Coordinators.

Also way less scary than big producers. 😂

So I started asking.

Eventually, I’d get on two commercial shoots that made me fall deeply in love with the set.

And from that moment on, all I could think about was how NOT to return to the office and how I’d use the remainder of my internship at Dirty Robber to build a roster of production coordinators and producers who would call on me for paid work because they saw how strong I was as an intern.

And that was really the beginning.

I wasn’t waiting for someone to hand me an opportunity.

I was figuring out where the opportunities were happening and positioning myself close enough to them to become useful.

That was my first real lesson in networking.

And I was just getting started.

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