Your selection of production crew for your film, documentary, commercial, music video or short film will be one of your single most important decisions.

Some of the roles you’ll need to fill may include director, producers, cinematographer, 1st AD, 2nd AD, Set PA, production designer, art directory, prop master, camera operator, 1st AC, 2nd AC, gaffer, hair and makeup, special effects artists, wardrobe department, boom operator, sound engineer and the list goes on.

On indie film productions many of these roles are combined into fewer roles, with less people responsible for more jobs. However, most video and film productions will be made with a group of people. This group of people will be known as your production crew. Many film and television studios work with the same crew across multiple projects. However, due to the nature of the creative process, a project’s production crew will need to change based on the needs of any given production.

A hair and makeup artist who would be a great fit on a high concept music video, might not be the same hair and makeup artists required for a hyper realistic, slice of life TV drama.

And for this reason, production companies need a way to streamline the process of scouting new creative talent and freelancers for each project they work on.

How to Hire a Production Crew

Hiring a production crew can be a time consuming process. Many roles need filled and you need to find the highest caliber of talent for each role that needs filled. Finding tier one talent is a huge challenge across all industries, and is pronounced when looking for talent in creative fields due to the collaborative, subjective and nuanced nature of the work.

However, taking the time to look for exceptional 10/10 talent, will pay dividends in the long run. Remember, that your film projects will only be as strong as your weakest link.

In this post we explore the topic of “local optimization” where we explore how downstream errors get pushed upstream and how it’s difficult (if not impossible) to remove these production errors once they are embedded in your project.

For this reason, it’s important to make the right crew hiring decisions early on.

Setting Up Crew Production Calls

If you’re currently looking to start hiring cast and crew for your production, you need to have some type of system in place to manage the application process and applicants. Using email is one way to do this and simply get production crew candidates to email you their portfolios and resumes. However, this approach gets messy and disorganized quickly. So I’m going to show you how you can use Stencil’s crew hiring software to streamline your workflow.

The first step in setting up a production crew hiring notice is to set up a project within Stencil and then click on “Hiring Call (Crew)” in the sidebar. This will bring you to a page where you can add as many crew hiring notices as you need. For example, here you’ll see that I have hiring notices added within my project here.

On this page interested candidates can learn more about the project that the production studio is hiring for. For example, they can see the production title, filming dates, a production summary as well as what type of project is being created, if it’s a free or paid gig, if it’s union or non-union and so on.

Keep in mind, each job you post, will be focused on hiring for a particular job type. So one crew hiring notice might be focused on finding a cinematographer, while another might be focused on finding a boom operator. The reason for this will be clear in a moment.

Also, as a side note here, you can embed all of your crew hiring notices on your own production studio’s website. This is important because you want all awareness about yoru project going over to your own production nstudio’s website. Therefore, in order to embed your crew hiring notices over on your own website you simply need to click on the button that says “embed this page on your site” and then copy and paste the embed code from the popup over on your own website.

You can simply create a dedicated page for your casting notices and then when it comes time to share the jobs you have available, you can share this direct link to your website. This will help you grow the overall awareness of your film or production studio in your region.

Likewise, you can brand the crew hiring notices to match your own brand’s colors. This allows you to seamlessly white label Stencil’s crew hiring software directly into your own website. Simply click on your avatar in the upper right corner and change the primary and secondary colors under “styling” to colors that match your brands colors. Now, your crew job board ads will show up with your brand’s look and feel.

Creating Crew Hiring Ads For Specific Jobs

Now, let’s jump back over to our crew hiring page again. Now, in order to add a new crew call, we simply need to click on the button that says “add new crew call”. You’ll need to fill out the information on this page, because this is the information that will show up when a candidate clicks on a crew call hiring ad.

With all of this information filled out, you can click on “add crew hiring notice”. Once this ad is posted, you can edit or delete it by clicking on the two little icons in the lower right corner of the ad.

Now it’s time to click on the button in the right side of the ad to be brought to the individual crew call.

On this page you can modify the content on the page by clicking on the button that says “change text”. This is valuable for a couple of reasons. First, if you’re ever hiring crew in different languages, this feature enables multi-language support. You can simply swap out the English text to the left with any other language (Spanish, German, French, Mandarin etc) over to the right. Any text you add to the fields over to the right will overwrite the text to the left.

However, alternatively you could use this “change text” feature to swap out text so that it becomes more relevant for the job you’re hiring for. For example, under the social media section here, you might want to specifically ask a cinematographer for their most recent cinematographers real. However, if you’re hiring a makeup artist you might instead ask for a link to their makeup portfolio. This “change text” feature within Stencil gives you full control over customizing each crew hiring notice and gearing the language towards the role being cast for.

It’s also important to note that you can embed these individual casting notices on your own production studio’s website as well. On any individual casting call page, you can click on this button that says “embed page on your website” and then simply copy and paste this code over on your own production studio’s website.

What this allows you to do, is to link directly to a specific crew hiring position from any third party website. For example, you could post your ad on a crew job board and you could link directly to your ad looking for cinematographers. And again, this is a great way to direct traffic over to your own production studio’s website to increase awareness about the productions that you’re working on. This is a fantastic way to build awareness about your projects and work in your community and geographic region.

Crew Applications Start Coming in

Once crew applications start coming in, you can click on this link in the sidebar which says “crew applications” to view all crew applications. On this page you’ll be able to see all of the applications which have come in and compare them side by side. Any applicant which you think is particularly deserving of attention you can shortlist, by clicking on the “shortlist” button. Or if an applicant is not what you’re looking for you can hide or delete their application as well.

You can also view each applicant’s portfolio and personal information as they entered it on their application form.

Just below that section, there is a section where you can add any notes you have about the applicant.

Similarly, you can grade each applicant out of 5 by simply clicking on the dots under the applicant’s name and then assign them a star rating out of five. Later on, you can filter candidates by star rating so you can zero in on the talent you find most promising.

Crew Hiring Conclusion

So that’s Stencil’s crew hiring software in a nutshell. Our software was designed to allow you to keep all of your casting calls and crew hiring calls location on your own website. It was also designed to help you stay organized and streamline your cast and crew hiring process.

Remember, you can sign up for a free trial of Stencil here and take our cast and crew hiring software for a spin to see if it suits your needs.

So that’s all I have for you today. Thanks for stopping by our filmmaking blog and be sure to check out the other tutorial we have over on our blog about adding casting calls (to find acting talent for your productions) to your production studio’s website.