Production Assistant Attire & Job Duties

Series Summary

Being a production assistant is not just about working long hours and getting coffee and snacks for the on-air talent and staff. A production assistant is the right arm for the producer, director and whoever else requires help before, during and after a broadcast or movie. Many productions assistants are required to know how a camera works, how to operate a sound board and deal with an ever-changing environment. In this free video series, learn about the exciting career of a production assistant (PA). An experienced PA explains all the job qualifications and duties. First, learn proper attire and overall job duties, how to tear down a set, white balance cameras and how a camera moves. Next, learn how studio lights work and how they should be held and set up, how to operate the light board and how to prep a news cast. Finally, learn to use the audio board, teleprompter, wrap an XLR cable and get coffee for coworkers.

Video Transcript

"Now in this segment we're going to learn what a PA is, the proper attire, and all the job duties. Now PA stands for Production Assistant. Which can many different things to many different companies. We're here at a TV station today, so production assistant means television production assistant. Now normally a production assistant doesn't really do a whole lot of hands on things, but luckily we're at a station that does let the PAs do a lot of hands on things. PAs tend to do many things from either go get donuts and coffee, to actual operation of the cameras and audio boards and different things like that. At this station here we do have PAs doing our camera operation for our news, for our audio board we have them doing as well, and also for our prompter. Now we're going to delve deeper into all of those segments later, but for now we'll tell you how to be a PA sort of. A PA usually will do everything and anything asked, and you'd start as the bottom rung person at the company. What they'll normally do any where between picking up boxes and moving them, to like I was saying run the actual equipment. Now proper attire for a PA is short sleeve shirt or longer, so kind of like what I'm wearing with long sleeves will be perfect. Long pants or shorts if it's in the summer, depending on your real, if you're really hot or if it's a really hot day. It doesn't really matter too much on the legs. And you want to make sure to wear a closed two shoe. No sandals, sandals are a big problem. Especially out in the studio. Because you should not wear sandals because if for some reason something falls or anything like that comes down. You don't want it landing on your toes, especially one of these lights. These lights weigh about any where between ten to thirty-five pounds. Now we're going to go into the aspects a little further now."