We held a successful Screenlink event last night together with Advertising Producers Aotearoa. The topic was the nature of working across TV commercials, scripted and narrative features.

It was interesting to hear about the pathways from some of the people in the room on how they got into, are progressing, or got ahead in the screen industry.

A common theme from some was the low-budget scripted pathway through TikTok and web series. We’ve seen this with some of our members, writer and director Victoria Boult being the most recent example, with nOOb.

nOOb started out as a short, scripted TikTok series funded by TikTok and NZ On Air, and became a half-hour series now available on ThreeNow. The  show has since been selected to appear at the Berlinale Series Market this year, and recently earned a spot at Canneseries 2025, where Victoria is heading off to shortly.

While just doing it is definitely a path that can work, either self-funded or with funding assistance, the guild worked on more formal pathways with other guilds and associations for new entrants to the working screen industry.

We spent two years engaging with the SkillsActive initiative, and then for two years with Toi Mai, the Workforce Development Council that included the screen sector, which replaced SkillsActive.

With the change of government at the last election, Te Pūkenga, the amalgamation of  Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs), and Toi Mai are disappearing. The disestablished Te Pūkenga will essentially go back to the old model of a network of Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs). Meanwhile, the Workforce Development Councils (WDCs) will be taken over by Industry Skills Boards.

The work we and the other guilds and associations did across those four or so years, while not a complete waste of time, does frustratingly seem in large part to be in vain. To be totally honest, we are pretty much where we were five years ago when we started on this.

One of the issues that we constantly encountered was the round peg screen industry being forced into the square hole of the formalised vocation training sector. It was never a comfortable match no matter how much your tried to shave off the round peg to fit.

Educational theory has its place, as do the practical elements of production as practised at the various film and media schools. But they never really prepared the graduates properly for the requirements of the working screen industry—something we all really wanted to address. This was made difficult, however, by the nature of screen sector work itself, which can be intermittent, is rarely long in nature, and requires screen workers to move from one production company to another, making tracking and training difficult.

We haven’t given up though.

When the new entities are in place we will undoubtedly engage with them once more and try to find a way through. But we’d much rather just be given some of the money, which for the wider reform of vocational training has gone into the millions of dollars, and get on with it ourselves.

We know pathways are needed. And we know we can build them if we are given the resources to do the job. That’s undoubtedly too simple a solution for what is made out to be a complex problem, certainly for the screen sector.

In the meantime, we encourage you to just keep doing it as well. And networking to find your way in—a tried and true method that still works.

Tui Ruwhiu
Executive Director

Last updated on 10 April 2025