The making of a filmmaker: Curating learning identities in early careers

Abstract

As the work with moving images has become digitized, the availability and affordability of filmmaking has facilitated new forms of creative content production in various genres and contexts. On an institutional level, the creative and cultural sector of work is increasingly characterized by more fluid organizational structures, which include competitive work arrangements, blurring boundaries between formal and informal education and flexible employment patterns. On an individual level, a growing number of young adults are aspiring to be professionals, perhaps famous, following new paths and learning trajectories as they work their way into the film and TV sector. This paper explores how five young aspiring filmmakers (two girls and three boys) are creating their individual learning trajectories in the pre-peripheral and peripheral stages in their career. By drawing on a sociocultural perspective and the notion of ‘figured worlds’, we aim to illustrate how the young filmmakers perform a learning identity in the research project Making a Filmmaker. In our discussion of using interviews as a research method, we explore the metaphor of curatorship to understand how the filmmakers are positioning themselves in the contexts researched here. The findings indicate that the filmmakers perform their identity as creators by positioning themselves in relation to others in collaborative work and by the ways in which they imagine themselves as future filmmakers working with specific styles and genres.