OUR STORY

Hiring experienced film crew is becoming tougher and tougher in an age where more and more content is being produced.

The Film Crew Institute founders kept running into this with their own projects. This wasn't an isolated case, colleagues across the industry were saying the same thing. It was also clear that while there was a push to develop diversity in the above-the-line talent, very few organizations were focusing on below-the-line.

In 2019, co-founders Richard and Amy Janes moved from Los Angeles, California, where their careers had seen them working for major studios such as Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney, and LionsGate, to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma slap bang in the middle of America. Their goal; to open an independent turn-key 12-acre movie studio with business partner Melodie Garneau.

The film industry in middle America was beginning to boom with more and more productions looking to shoot outside of the traditional film hubs, and this was a great opportunity to crate a new business model around premium narrative and documentary feature production.

With a production facility ready to go, the need for a program that quickly trained crew with practical 'must know' information that spoke to real world crew experiences was real. And so the Oklahoma Film and Television Academy (OFTA) was born.

Two years later, this course was graduating more below-the-line crew than almost any other courses in North America with students finding work within weeks of graduation.

Word spread fast and very quickly OFTA was being tapped by film studios such as LionsGate and Apple+ to recruit and train workforce for their upcoming shows.

In 2022, in response to the global demand, OFTA changed its name to the Film Crew Institute and began serving students all over the world with their highly successful SET READY™ short course program. Specialization courses continue both online and in-person on their Oklahoma campus alongside a best in class hands on training course where students achieve their first professional credit working alongside industry professionals as their mentor.

And the rest, as they say, is history!

REDRESSING THE IMBALANCE

Our mission is to redress the diversity and social economic imbalance of our industry's crew base so that it can more accurately represent the full diversity of the audiences that consume our content.

The Film Crew Institute is at the forefront of diversity training around the world. We work hand-in-hand with studios, networks, streamers, and producers to recruit and train local crew no matter where in the world they are rolling cameras.