How producers find crew: what your profile gets filtered on
5 minute read
A producer looking for a crew member is not browsing. They have a date, a position and a budget, and they filter to the people who match all three. Everything on your profile is either one of those filters, the thing that gets you shortlisted once you pass them, or dead weight. Here is which is which.
The three filters that run first
Search on a crew platform is not a search box. It is a set of narrowing filters, and the ones that run first decide whether a producer ever reads your name.
- Position. What you do, matched against what they need for that role.
- Availability on a date. Not this month, not generally, the specific day they are shooting.
- Union or guild. Where the production is under an agreement, this is a hard filter rather than a preference.
Rate, reel and everything else come after. They decide who gets the request out of the people who already passed. A profile that fails one of the three is not compared on the rest.
Primary and secondary positions
Most crew do more than one job. A camera operator who also pulls focus, a gaffer who takes best boy work on bigger shows, a sound mixer who boom operates when the day is small.
Positions are held as primary and secondary for exactly that reason. Your primary is what you want to be booked as. Your secondaries are the roles you will take, and they are the reason you appear in a search you would otherwise miss. Leaving them blank narrows you to one job title.
Secondary does not mean lesser. It means a role you are willing to work rather than the one you lead with, and on a short shoot it is frequently the one that pays.
Availability is a state, not a guess
A calendar carries four states per day, and the middle two do the work:
| State | What a producer reads it as |
|---|---|
| Available | Ask me, I can take this |
| Tentative | Pencilled to something else, worth asking anyway |
| Booked | Committed, do not ask for this day |
| Unavailable | Not working, for any reason |
Tentative is the state most crew skip and the one that gets the most calls. A producer chasing a Tuesday will ask a tentative first refusal before they widen the search, because a pencil is not a booking and they know it.
A calendar left blank is not read as available. It is read as unmaintained, which is worse than either.
Rate, or rate on request
A day rate can be left off. That is a real option, held as no rate rather than as zero, and it shows as rate on request.
It costs you something, though. A producer filtering a list of twenty for a budget will work through the ones with a number first, because those are the ones they can price without sending a message. Rate on request works best when you are already known to the people booking you, and worst when you are trying to be found by someone new.
A kit or equipment fee is a separate daily figure, not something to fold into the rate. Producers budget the two on different lines and payroll carries them in different columns, so a rate quietly inclusive of kit reads as expensive labor.
Willing to travel is a single flag that widens every search you appear in beyond your own city. If it is true, set it.
The switch that hides you
Discoverability is a toggle on the profile. Off, and you are still on the platform, still able to log hours for the productions you are on, and invisible to any producer who has not worked with you before.
That is the right setting for someone fully booked out on a long-running show and the wrong one for anyone looking for the next thing. It is worth checking, because it is the kind of setting that gets turned off during a busy stretch and never turned back on.
How you get on in the first place
By invitation from a producer or department head you have worked with. Breadshift is a closed network rather than an open marketplace, on the view that closed networks beat open ones when the question is who is available Tuesday.
Practically, that means the profile fields above matter most in the weeks after someone invites you, when producers who have never met you are seeing your name for the first time in a filtered list.
Questions
- Does rate on request hurt me?
- With people who already book you, no. With a producer working through a filtered list against a budget, yes, because you are the row they have to send a message to before they can compare you.
- Who can see my rate?
- Producers you have worked with, and producers you have opted in to be discoverable by. You set that on your profile.
- How often do I need to update the calendar?
- When something changes. The state that earns you calls is tentative, and tentative only exists if you mark the days you have pencilled rather than leaving them blank.
- Can I sign up myself?
- Not today. Crew join by invitation from a producer or department head. If you have worked with someone using Breadshift, asking them to invite you is the route.