Success in South Africa

by Nicole Beaudoin, Film Intern in Cape Town, South Africa, Winter term 2008

Living and working in South Africa has been the greatest and most positive experience of my life so far, and was a much needed change in routine from what I had been experiencing at home. I’ve had the opportunity to experience first-hand the creative process and inner workings of a film shoot. This work experience will be invaluable as I graduate and start my career.
My first day at the internship site, I wore heels. After seeing the laid back attitude and casual attire of the office, I switched to flip flops for the remainder of my internship. Possibly the greatest thing about Stillking Films is the office space in which it is located- an historic building from 1876 with an uneven wood floors and a retro elevator featuring sliding metal grating. Complete with couches, an espresso machine, and a small staff who were closer to friends than co-workers, going to the office each day was delightful. Everyone at work was a coffee fiend, which made my gift of coffee beans from Café Umbria in Seattle a big hit. I am now also a coffee fiend, which is ironic if you consider that I never drank coffee previously when living in Seattle of all places. Everyone was a big smoker too; luckily I haven’t picked up that habit as well.
My official title at the office was “Production Secretary.” This, combined with my desk wielding status, was a contributing factor to experiencing a personal life moment to be remembered forever: on February 12, 2008 at roughly 5:22pm, one of the Production Assistants asked me if he could bring me some tea or coffee. My immediate thoughts were “Ha ha ha, I win! I’m totally going to make it in this industry!” and my answer was, “coffee, please!” If you are not coming from an entertainment industry background, the significance of this moment might be lost on you. Let’s just say that after last summer’s experience of daily fetching my three bosses coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice, and plain toasted bagels with peanut butter, getting served coffee was a proud moment for me and I drank every drop.
It was definitely exciting and enlightening to see first-hand the way things work in the film industry. Everything is waiting, waiting, waiting, and then GO. During the Toyota commercial shoot I worked on, I also had the opportunity to help manage casting-call backs. Casting is an incredibly crazy process, I believe over a thousand people were originally looked at. Most of the actors seemed to know each other and put up a “how you are doing, man, aren’t we great friends” attitude, even though they were ostensibly competing. The shoot ended up requiring a large cast for several short vignette sequences.
It required even more crew, and allowed me to thoroughly grasp how much I need to work on remembering people’s names and job titles. Having first-hand experience on a set also gave me some insights into things I would have overlooked as trivial prior to this experience. Such as catering, which is a lot more important than I originally thought. Hungry crew are grumpy crew, and those guys work hard and both need and thoroughly deserve a constant supply of good food. The on-set medic also dispensed vitamins to everyone each morning after breakfast, which I found interesting, and packets of glucose on the evening the shoot was to run past midnight, which I found bizarre but is apparently common practice. I remember Rudi, the producer at Stillking, saying “oh, is it glucose time?” as though it was no big deal.
Also no big deal in the entertainment industry is gossip. Everyone knows everyone and very openly discusses other people. It’s a very relaxed industry; I actually spent a good portion of one afternoon on set comparing the various crew members and picking which were the most physically attractive along with my boss, the casting coordinator, and one of the PAs. The First A.D. got a positive rating by consensus.
There are a few people I met in Cape Town that really stood out to me. One of them was Regina, the wonderful woman who came to the Stillking Offices to clean on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was a little weird having someone clean the office during the day. I felt a little bourgeoisie, particularly when Regina would clear things off my desk, like empty coffee mugs. I soon got used to it, particularly after seeing the interactions between Regina and the rest of the office, who really valued her work, joked around with her, always made sure she stopped and ate lunch. Regina has an absolutely brilliant smile. It lights up her whole being and makes me feel wonderful. Morris, the eighty-five year old security guard in the building was delightful too.

It’s little moments of interaction with these people that I will remember about my experience in Cape Town. I shared my umbrella with a woman while waiting for the bus. Then I saw her the next day and we chatted about her family. The really nice bookstore owner in Obz who picked out a huge stack of books for me by South African authors, and then cleared a space for me to sit and look through them. The anarchist youth I sat next to on the mini-bus who was writing a “crash”-esque movie set in Cape Town who wondered why none of the Americans he had met were Bush supporters. The woman whose husband and daughter lived in Texas I regularly bought ice cream from until she got a different job.
Coming home was weird. Everything felt exactly the same and different at the same time. Maybe it was just me that was different. I’ve done a good job of avoiding the same routine I had before Cape Town and doing things a little differently.
Overall, I feel as though my time spent abroad developed both my patience/chillness and my maturity. I know I definitely want to be incredibly involved in the creative process when I am a filmmaker, and work on more than just the logistics and scheduling. I want a project to feel like “my” project, not in the sense that I own it exclusively, but that I am incredibly passionate about it. I am confident, knowing that I successfully handled the constant unfamiliarity of working and living in a foreign country, and can easily handle anything in my life back home as well.