A normal university experience is all about trying new things and putting yourself out of your comfort zone in order to learn, this is true even more so for a university like LIPA. So baring this in mind when the second years pitched their projects to us I thought I’d push myself outside of the comforts of music based work and volunteer to help on a film as a runner. Safe to say, I will never work on a film ever again.

There was not one aspect of this project that I enjoyed. I found it dull, I felt useless as I had nothing to do and my roll held no importance whatsoever, and most of all my being there felt a huge waste of time. On top of all this, it took up 5 days of my christmas holiday… not that I’m bitter about that or anything. Despite this I did learn how to manage myself around people who really tested my patience. Whereas before I may have dealt with someone who I found to be overly arrogant and demanding by being rude and obnoxious in response, here I learnt to behave essentially. I began to realise that sometimes when you’re the least important person working within a team that you do have to sometimes take shit and that’s just how its got to be. I call it a team but it didn’t hold the comfort of the dynamics of teams I usually work in, it felt like a hierarchy of people with underlying tension between many of them. Having said all this I am glad in some ways that I joined this project as I did meet new people, I now have more contacts within LIPA and having tested the waters I’ve assured myself that music is my passion and it’s where I need to be.

Everyone is stressed, everyone has things to do and someones attitude and behaviour is very rarely a something personally aimed towards you, so just deal with it. This may sound quite abrupt and insincere but it genuinely is a lesson that I will value, and its an important one at that in an industry such as entertainment.

This shouldn’t dampen ambition though. No matter what career path you end up leading you will always come across people that you clash with and find difficult to work with. The sooner you learn to deal with people like this through negotiation, compromise and patience the easier your job will be. Sometimes you’ve just got to take a deep breath and get on with it.

Or just vow never to work on a film again.