WORKING IN SHOWBIZ

HOW TO PREPARE YOURSELF

Whichever way you start you’ll need to get prepared BEFORE you start. The reality is you will be on your feet most of the day, so start with that. Go buy some steel capped boots, preferably second hand. Then put them on and start walking.

At the start you’ll probably do bump in and or bump out, each for between four and six hours so get yourself up to 8,000 steps a day at the start. Walk and keep walking around your ‘hood. Once the feet start to settle into the boots, make sure the boots look ‘used’ and not new. Turning up with brand new boots will mark you as a newbie which also means you may be considered a ‘noob’. Don’t be one of those!

Next, put on a black T-shirt, sunscreen and hat and start walking under a hot sun. Take water with Hydrolyte and drink plenty of it. Buy an instant cold towel that reacts with water and cools off as it dries you. Just make it damp, wave it through the air, and stuff it under your hat. All of the above kept me vertical and functional through a heatwave, working in a hot tent. The young lighting dude didn’t make it; he got heat stroke.

When you get to work on the show, as well as the bump in and out, you’ll need to be able to do up to 20,000 steps a day. By then you will be physically fit. Then you need to work on remaining that way.

It amazes me to see most crew arrive without food or water! I got through some very tough show days because I carried more than enough food. I’d see crew at around five hours in, looking for food to buy. More often than not, that ends up being the wrong food. You need ‘fuel’ and the harder you work, the more you need. Healthy snacks, a full meal, and energy food. It takes time and effort to prepare but the alternative could be failure.

Failure

It’s an ugly word, and an even worse threat to your wellbeing. I’ve tasted and eaten the occasional plate of failure. Three divorces, a couple of business closures, cancer and bankruptcy have all visited me. Don’t be like Julius Grafton.

We all make mistakes, and if we learn from them, we are better for it. That means working hard on owning your mistakes. One of my mistakes in recent years was around losing control of myself. One contributed to a business loss that was probably worth around a million dollars. The scenario was a partnership where a third-party protagonist schemed up a Machiavellian plan that relied on provoking me – it worked. I used a lot of nouns and verbs giving my partner what I considered was an accurate character assessment. My life lesson? Never EVER go into a partnership with someone who has a semi-retired attack dog lawyer as a spouse!

While it is really easy to foresee certain categories of failure, others come around a blind corner to ambush you. Another endless source of amazement to me is how little we tech crew workshop failure! I reprogrammed my brain using pilot training, where they totally punch into you the life and death difference between memorising checklists and not. “There are old pilots, and bold pilots”, my instructor told me. “But there are no old, bold pilots!”

Do two things early and frequently. Ask questions, and workshop failure and redundancy. But do these things carefully and in a considerate manner. Don’t ask unnecessary questions or rabbit on. You’ll get downgraded and in a career that is often day to day, you probably won’t get counselled or warned. It’ll just be less work, with you pondering why. And that is failure.