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.
Introduction
The availability and affordability of filmmaking has facilitated new forms of creative content production in a wide range of genres and contexts. This ease of access to digital equipment and resources allows young people to develop learning trajectories in new ways and work with moving images across a wide range of learning communities. Subsequently, a growing number of young adults are working with moving images in formal and informal educational contexts, as they are aspiring to become professionals and even famous filmmakers through their creative work.
The aim of this paper is to look beyond the boundaries of different learning contexts by tracing the learning trajectories of five young, aspiring filmmakers in Norway over a four-year period. By following the young adults from the end of a media and communication programme in upper secondary school (aged 18–19 years) to their first years as film students or freelancers, we aim to understand how they develop a learning identity as members of different contexts for learning about filmmaking.
The paper starts by examining what it means to be an aspiring filmmaker in a creative labour market. The argument is that the changing societal and cultural conditions for filmmaking have provided young filmmakers with a number of different options, which blur the boundaries between formal and informal learning environments. We add the literature of sociocultural approaches to creativity to this perspective, arguing for the recognition of the individual as the unit of analysis. In our analysis, we pose two inter-related questions that guide our investigation of the empirical data:
How do young filmmakers perform a learning identity when talking about the collaborative process of filmmaking? In which ways do aspiring filmmakers use genres and styles as identity markers in their future orientation as filmmakers?
In our endeavour to answer the two research questions, we find the concept of the ‘figured world’ (Holland et al. 1998) helpful in understanding how these young adults are positioning themselves as students and freelancers as well as future filmmakers, and thus adopting a learning identity (Gilje, 2012; Urrieta, 2007). Figured world is a socially produced and culturally constructed ‘realm of interpretation’, and the analytical perspective pays attention to the ways in which cultural artefacts mediate the formation of identity and learning in processes of social change (Barton and Hamilton, 2005; Holland et al., 1998). We discuss how this learning, and identity work relates to creativity in the filmmakers’ collaborative work and their orientation towards genres and styles in filmmaking. In doing this, questions of curatorship emerge and we explore the metaphor and its relationship to agency, understood as the socio-culturally, mediated ability to act in the world (everyday agency) and on the world (making an impact on the world).
Creativity and the cultural sector: a concise review
Throughout the last decade, a large number of studies have examined boundary-breaking creative work as a driving force in the cultural and creative sector in the Western world (Banks, 2007; Brabazon, 2008; Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2011; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; McKinlay and Smith, 2009). Based upon larger surveys of students in creative studies, scholars have identified that a surprisingly large number of aspiring artists manage to earn most of their income from jobs related to studies in creative educational programmes (Cunningham, 2011; Hartley, 2010; Hearn and Brow, 2008). In some of these studies, particular attention has been paid to the creative class, or creative citizens, who tend to build global networks at the same time that they build communities in big cities (Flew, 2013; Florida, 2012; Florida et al., 2012; Grossman et al., 2009). This form of new media entrepreneurism involves young people's mobilization and motivation to market their new media skills and their networking activities in social media (Jenkins et al., 2013; Lessig, 2008).
In Europe, the harnessing of creativity as part of the new media entrepreneurism has provided new perspectives on creativity, identity and learning in a digital era (Drotner, 2011; Loveless and Williamson, 2013). This is particularly evident in the domain of moving image production and filmmaking, but most of the empirical research has looked at the economic aspects of being a filmmaker (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2009) or studied communities of practice and creative learning trajectories in related domains (McLeod et al., 2011). Except for a few examples, (Barron et al., 2010; Drotner, 2008; Ito 2009), there seems to be a lack of empirical studies on learning, identity work and creativity among what we will term pre-peripheral and peripheral members in the community of filmmakers. A small-scale study conducted in Norway is interesting, as it identifies how eight freelancers in the Norwegian film industry oriented themselves towards discourses on art and filmmaking. Stavrum's study identified how filmmakers either positioned themselves as ‘artistic’ filmmakers or ‘business’ filmmakers, which are discernible in terms of style and genre (2009). Although the aforementioned studies give fresh insight into the changing nature of creative and cultural industries, they do not offer a detailed analysis of the identity work involved in the learning trajectories among aspiring creative workers. As pointed by Julian Sefton-Green (2013), these accounts of identity work in empirical research studies are rare, as previous research has been concerned mainly with ‘certain kinds of key decisions – especially as they relate to wrong turnings and the trial and error nature of development’ (2013: 28).
Understanding identity, learning and creativity in filmmaking
Studies on creativity have tended to address four aspects: the creative person, process, product and press (Runco and Pagnani, 2011), and it is normal to see research on the creative process complementing research on creative people (Runco and Pagnani, 2011: 65). However, these psychological perspectives have been challenged, as they, according to Amabile (1996), tend to be built on the researchers' view of creativity. By paying attention to creative processes in context, the agents and actors in each domain become important. Csikszentmihalyi (1996) elaborated on this view by arguing that creativity is also a property of societies, cultures and historical periods. In his book Creativity (1996), he defines the domain, the field and the person, which was later developed into a sociocultural model of creativity (see for instance Sawyer, 2012). Consequently, a domain like filmmaking has peripheral participants and experts, the latter being those who define if an outcome of an activity is creative and contributes with something new in the domain. In this perspective, creativity is defined, as an outcome of an activity in a sociocultural context based upon what the ‘gate-keepers’ of the domain agree is creative.
Our aim in the Making a Filmmaker project is to explore how individuals in their early careers appropriate and master the domain of filmmaking while they are embarking on their career trajectories and building resources across a wide range of contexts. Drawing on the sociocultural perspective on creativity, we aim to understand how each filmmaker crafts a learning trajectory based on a number of events in which the young filmmakers have taken a position in their educational route. By positioning themselves, they are acting in the world and upon the world. As prize-winning young filmmakers, the individuals in this study have already ‘passed’ some of the gatekeepers in their world. However, they started in the first part of the study (2008) as pre-peripheral in the community of professional filmmakers as they are working to take a ‘position’ in this specific domain in Norway.
We find this orientation towards a sociocultural approach to creativity research important, as it may spark an interest in how young people work their way into the creative sector. This move towards the centre of the domain of filmmaking can easily be framed as a participation in the ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998, 2010). However, we want to elaborate this perspective by paying more attention to the realm of interpretation and action generated by each individual in the study. In our endeavour of doing so, we are particularly concerned with how well each individual will perform a (future) position as a filmmaker.
In our thinking about identity, learning and creativity, we find the idea of figured worlds (Holland, 1998) interesting. A figured world is a socially produced and culturally constructed ‘realm of interpretation’ in which a particular set of actors and agents engage in meaningful acts. These worlds are continuously figured in practice through the use of cultural artefacts (Bartlett, 2007; Barton and Hamilton, 2005; Holland et al., 1998). In filmmaking, styles, genres and techniques are cultural artefacts, which the participants must master and appropriate across the diverse contexts they participate in throughout their learning trajectories (Gilje, 2010). The analytical perspective in figured worlds pays attention to the individual as a unit of analysis, and their use of cultural artefacts or objects inscribed by the collective attribution of meaning. Compared to an analysis of learning in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), the focus on reification is more on the ways in which cultural artefacts mediate the formation of identity and processes of social change (Barton & Hamilton, 2005). As pointed out by Barton and Hamilton (2005) the possibilities of creative and generative change inherent in that process are not foregrounded in Wenger's work.
Accordingly, the perspective of figured world gives priority to agency in the analysis as it provide a lens to understand how individuals ‘figure out’ who they are within a specific context. The capacity to figure in or on the world is based on each individual's personal history and interactions with other participants who populate these worlds (Robinson, 2007). Urrieta (2007) reminds us of how participation in figured worlds can enable young people to re-conceptualize who they are, or shift in who they understand themselves to be: ‘Through this figuring, individuals also come to understand their ability to craft their future participation, or agency, in and across figured worlds’ (2007: 120). We explore this thesis, scrutinizing young people's learning trajectories as an agentive process in which they are drawing on resources from a wide range of educational contexts and from their professional work as freelancers. This analytical lens gives us an opportunity to study the possibilities of creative and generative change inherent in the process of becoming a filmmaker in a study with a longitudinal research design. By combining a sociocultural perspective on creativity with the analytical lens provided in the notion of figured world, the analysis pays attention to how each individual adopts a learning identity as a filmmaker by his or her positioning in the interviews.
The Filmmaker Project (2008–2013): Part I and II
In 2007–08, the Making a Filmmaker project started out as a collaboration between four researchers in Denmark, Sweden and Norway (see Gilje, 2012; Gilje et al., 2010; Lindstrand et al., 2011). 1 The aim in the first phase of the project was to investigate how 29 young, prize-winning and aspiring filmmakers established and experienced their personal learning trajectories in formal and informal contexts. For instance, in one of the articles from this first phase of the study (Gilje, 2012), we illustrated the dynamic process of how four young filmmakers formed a creative identity through experience and participation in formal and informal learning contexts. We explored how some of the young filmmakers performed agency by positioning themselves against the formal learning context. Their position was counterpoised to a more authorised ‘schooled identity’ found among other filmmakers (Gilje, 2012).
In 2008, the 10 Norwegian filmmakers in the project were just about to finish a media and communication programme in upper secondary school (aged 18–19 years). Four years later, in 2012, the Norwegian filmmakers were invited to participate in a follow-up study, making part of the Making a Filmmaker study a longitudinal study, which paid more attention to how young filmmakers engineered their career trajectories in the domain of filmmaking in Norway. Seven of the young adults were engaged in filmmaking on a full-time basis in 2012, and all of these youngsters agreed to participate in this second part of the study. 2 This implies that some of the filmmakers in the study were working within film school boundaries, where there are specific methods and ideas for learning (Philipsen, 2009), while others had the opportunity to set the rules for filmmaking as young freelancers working their way into the sector. Five of these seven filmmakers (23–24 years old in 2013) are reported on in this paper (two girls, three boys; Eirin, Ragnhild, Martin, Markus and Morten). 3
In the Making a Filmmaker project, we were particularly interested in how these filmmakers built career trajectories covering longer timescales and built on specific learning trajectories and paths they have followed across a wide range of contexts. In the longitudinal research design, we were able to capture how each filmmaker constructed a career trajectory over time as they reflected upon their educational routes when interviewed for a second time. All the interviews were transcribed and coded in NVIVO software for coding qualitative data. 4
Curatorship in interviews: methodological considerations
As indicated above, we were particularly interested in how identity is created and negotiated in social interaction. In our discussion of method, we are concerned with the ways in which the filmmakers adopt a specific learning identity in the context of being interviewed. As in all cases in which interviews were used to collect and construct data, we considered that statements and answers given by participants were discursively formed and highly dependent on social dynamics and other aspects related to the contexts of the interview (Kvale, 1997; Silverman, 2004). The interviews facilitated the telling of narratives and life-trajectories (McLeod and Thomson, 2009) about filmmaking inasmuch as the interviewees reflected upon their role as learners in school (and other contexts for learning), makers of moving images and viewers of films.
By incorporating interviewee and interviewer subjectivity, we formed an emic perspective (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007: 194–195) on how a figured world is created by young filmmakers. Taking this approach to the interviews as research data about filmmakers and filmmaking, we assumed that new generations of filmmakers tend to curate themselves in new ways (Jenkins and Bertozzi, 2008). Thus, we might consider the interview in this project as a ‘space’ where the filmmakers practice for their future curating as directors and producers in terms of real world media exposure. Following this line of thought, the curatorship in the interviews is a prerequisite for curating themselves as professional filmmakers in the future. It might be understood as rehearsing self-promotion, which you have to do to be an artist. Curatorship in interviews with researchers is then an exercise in doing PR for these young filmmakers.
The sociocultural lens on creativity pays attention to the position of the filmmakers in this study, as they are working their way into the community of filmmakers in the creative and cultural sector. In order to do so, young filmmakers need to be granted access by the gatekeepers of this special domain (Sawyer, 2012). As indicated above in our description of the first phase of this study, all the participants got access to what we consider a playground for young filmmakers because they had all won a prize in a youth film festival. Four years later, they had turned their skills and competencies in filmmaking into freelance careers or had been chosen for one of the few available student positions at the prestigious national film school in Norway. At this point in their trajectories as young filmmakers, we met them again in part II of the Making a Filmmaker project.
Analysis
We have structured the analysis as a two-folded argument, as it relates to the two interrelated research questions posed in the beginning of this paper. The two themes we are investigating surfaced in the preliminary analysis of the transcribed interviews as we worked with the coding in NVIVO. Much of the interviews revolved around the young filmmakers talking about themselves as learners and imagining themselves as future filmmakers. The first research question aims to understand how the filmmakers position themselves within the wider community of filmmakers in which they participate. Second, we aim to understand how the filmmakers used references to genres and styles as identity markers in the interviews.
I. Positioning an identity in the collaborative work of filmmaking
The first theme in the analysis pays attention to the collaborative aspects of filmmaking. The challenges of working with others on a team are important in the collaborative process of making moving images. As an important method in the national film school, students are put together in groups, with restrictions on those with whom they can work.
5
An excerpt from the interview with Ragnhild, a 23-year-old student at the Norwegian film school, serves as an introduction to this phenomenon, as it explains how the method at the school allows her to take certain positions and refuse others. Excerpt 1: Ragnhild: Filmskolen – especially in the beginning – decides whom you are going to collaborate with, you don't get to choose. You don't get to choose your team until the final project. So it has been really exciting to see – I'm the only producer [who] has been working with all the directors – who will work together when we get to choose for ourselves. It has been very good, since I managed to gather a very skilful group, a good team. But before this, Filmskolen has given really strict rules concerning whom you get to work with. We take turns, it is very democratic. Interviewer: But now that you get to decide who you'd like to choose as a director for your projects, and what kind of values are you looking for? Ragnhild: Oh, ok. I got in touch with most of the directors through Filmskolen, and what is actually most important to me is quality. I don't think it is important whether they want to make genre films or if they want to make … something that matters to them. [What matters is] that they create something real that means something…The girl that I made my final project with … is very skilled … I would like to work with later on, and the guy who won the Amanda for best short film – we've talked about making something, so that's nice, very nice. It is good that we – the film school gang that we are – stick together after the school years and give each other jobs or work together.
The first part of this excerpt shows how Ragnhild made sense of this specific way of organizing people in the collaborative work at the school. However, in the latter part, Ragnhild used her experiences from working with different people as a point of departure in thinking about herself as a future filmmaker. She refers to ‘quality’, rather than genre, as a more important criterion for choosing partners in future projects, and it is important for her that filmmakers must ‘create something real that means something’. These statements might imply that she is concerned with artistic and authentic ways of working with moving images.
Although this kind of collaborative work seemed to work well for Ragnhild as a method, it also felt challenging for the students as they endeavoured to carve out identities as filmmakers. Eirin was a third-year student in a media and communications programme in upper secondary school when she was interviewed for the first time in the Making a Filmmaker project. She had already won several prizes for her short films and had been chosen as one of eight director-students at the Norwegian film school when she applied in 2011. Interviewed after the first year, she was asked to reflect upon the methods of the national film school, Eirin pointed to the number of ‘voices’ in a collaborative project. She sometimes finds it hard to develop her own identity as a filmmaker within a formal educational setting. Excerpt 2: Eirin: That is kind of difficult, but what is special about our education is that collaborative work is the main focus, and we are supposed to create things as a group … It can be more difficult to find your own voice because you get a script that a scriptwriter has written, and then you've got a producer that has a strong opinion, and then you've got a photographer, and then you have to make sure that all these people can have their own vision, but at the same time find your own personal voice. It is a bit tricky to handle sometimes.
Eirin describes the tension between finding her own voice and working with others who have their creative ideas about the outcome of the activity. This excerpt points towards what can be felt as boundaries in the creative process because of the methods used in formal education. As students on the same film school, Ragnhild and Eirin position themselves differently when talking about the collaborative process based upon this method. While Eirin finds the norms and rules of collaboration challenging in terms of finding their own voice in the community with many strong personalities, Ragnhild thinks the specific method gives her ideas about whom she wants to collaborate with in the future. As pointed out by both of them, there is a restriction of choices both in terms of whom you can work with and what you are supposed to do. Ragnhild and Eirin position themselves differently in this respect. We might argue that each takes on a different identity of what it means to be a filmmaker. While Ragnhild, as a future producer, emphasises the great experience of working with different people, Eirin, as a future director, finds it hard to develop her own voice within the strict boundaries of this approach.
The next two excerpts pay attention to how creative ideas are developed in two very different contexts for learning. An excerpt with Martin, a 22-year-old filmmaker, who was just about to finish the media and communication programme when he was interviewed in the first phase of the project, is now joining a media design school. In this school, the collaborative work differs from the national film school, as it has no strict organizing principles. Martin appreciates working with no rules and norms in his educational setting. Excerpt 3: Martin: Yes, this year, one of the main [foci] is to develop your own ideas and to create your own concepts, but I feel kind of free when it comes to that. There are no constraints at all; you can make whatever you like, and you will get guidance and feedback from other students and teachers. I find this very helpful. I feel like the freedom you get is the freedom you will have in working life – you will have to come up with great ideas and be able to develop them so that it is possible to produce from them. So in that way, I feel like the programme is organized so that you can manage a working life later on.
As this excerpt indicates, Martin admires the freedom of method at this school and presumes this way of working with creative ideas can continue in his professional career. He likes the idea of working with no boundaries and admires the community of teachers and students, as they give feedback on his work. In this way, he is positioning himself as a filmmaker without any constraints, and his ideas and ‘concepts’ can develop with no limits in formal education. He presumes this will also be the case in his future professional career.
The two last filmmakers in this paper do not take part in formal education. As freelancers working together in a small company, they aim to build their own brand, emphasising finding their own voice in the film sector in Norway. As they are building a career by engineering their own personal learning trajectories, they might represent a new creative class of young people who are marketing themselves and their new media skills (Lessig, 2008). In this work, they have developed their own methods. Excerpt 4. Morten: I think that your tool is that we're two people that [are] sort of trapped in a room and kind of isolated from the rest of the world. We work very hard together, and I think it is very efficient because you have to articulate your thoughts all the time. It is kind of like going to a shrink or something. Things are in constant development and something happens all the time. It is in itself a very powerful tool. Morten: We like it when we watch other people's films assume a life of their own; when we make them ourselves, we want others to experience this in the same way. In our mind, the process of making the film very important. We like to stay in our own world and find out what it's going to be like, what kind of world is this, how are we going to express it [and] the challenges and the pain that comes with it. It is a really good process. In some way[s], we really enjoy [it]. The hardest time is right after we finish something. Markus: That is actually not very fulfilling. Interviewer: To wait for something new? Markus: Yes. Morten: The whole process is very enjoyable.
In regards to our first research questions, two points can be made here. First, making their careers as filmmakers, they emphasise the value of not being exposed to others in the film business. They have created their own learning environment, which seems isolated from the rest of the world. Consequently, they stress the importance of creating their own community of practice, where they are not taking the position of peripheral members. Second, they position themselves as creative filmmakers by expressing how important this self-initiated process is for their creative making. The approach and emphasis on this isolated, creative process is very different from the other filmmakers, as Markus and Morten are positioning themselves as creative agents and not as students. However, the ways in which they position themselves towards the creative act of filmmaking is an artistic approach driven by the creative process itself within a ‘closed’ community, i.e. their own film business.
II. Identity through genres and styles among young filmmakers
In this second part of the analysis, we are concerned with how each individual offers a future orientation of his or her career as a filmmaker. We consider ideas about future careers to be a figured world where they can exercise their agency, i.e., a world that they are able to act in and on by positioning themselves. In the interviews, we identified excerpts where the young filmmakers described different styles and genres. We analysed this talk and argue that they are using these references as identity markers in the context of the interview situation. We start with Eirin again, as she talks about her future filmmaking career, her aspirations and the kinds of genres and styles in which she wants to work. Excerpt 5: Eirin: That is sort of what I am going to find out during the next years. But I'm starting to realize that there are some themes that are recurring. I find [leading] female characters very intriguing, [as well as] the transitional periods – from being a child to becoming a youth and from adolescence to becoming a grown-up. Those moments when you suddenly understand more of the grown-up world, and you realize that you're not or that the world is not as innocent as you thought it was, [those are] very intriguing. I think I will be working within a sort of drama genre but always with a humoristic touch. I think so. And I also like things that express [a] kind of elevated reality, but it really depends on the film [and] what it can handle. Interviewer: What do you mean by that? Eirin: Hmm, that you take it to a higher level than mundane realism [literally translated: kitchen realism], that it can evolve more in the direction of Amelie, which is very magical realism, elevated. That you take the characters one step further. Bent Hamer [Norwegian director] works this way too. You can [include] additional features because you know it wouldn't happen in real life, but it can happen in this universe – you create your own universe. I find this really intriguing. It is really hard, but it is very, very interesting.
Two topics are particularly interesting in this first excerpt. The first relates to questions of genre. Here, Eirin noted her interest in drama with humour; however, she specified this genre by referencing the film Amelie [Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Jeunet, 2001] as magical realism and by referencing Norwegian director Bent Hamer's films. In this way, she orients her own future by referring to one genre and more specifically to the style and universe of other films and filmmakers. This might be understood as one way of positioning in the context of the interview, as she is adopting a future identity as a female director. Her imagination of future films is established in the statement: ‘You can allow additional features, because you know it wouldn't happen in real life, but it can happen in this universe, you create your own universe. I find this really intriguing. It is really hard, but it is very, very interesting’. This last utterance might indicate the challenge in working in this community of professional filmmakers – in her eagerness to become a filmmaker, she is positioning herself as a hard-working, female director in a male-dominated cultural and creative sector.
This preliminary analysis of Eirin's figured world can be contrasted with an excerpt from the interview with Morten and Markus. Even though they joined the same media and communication programme as Eirin, they have developed their own creative careers outside the formal educational setting. As part of their work in their own business, they spend a lot of time watching films together, usually at the beginning of the day. As they have been working closely together since upper secondary school and now in their company, they were interviewed together by Groeng in their work place in the early autumn 2012. She asked them to reflect on how they orchestrate their daily rituals when running a company together and how they balanced being artistic with the technical aspects of upper secondary school. Excerpt 6: Markus: Definitely the first [referring to artistic expression]. It is an intuitive thing: which directors' films you like, and how that makes you want to know more about their methods … read[ing] anecdotes, those kinds of things … [regarding] the technical aspects, we're not too interested in that. That's in a way more like a tool – things that you pick up. Morten: It becomes technical in another way because you're watching, and it is easy to look for references from other films and stuff – watch how they've set the light for instance – but for us [and] the educational program that we're discussing now, these courses have been more about expression than how to set the lighting for a scene or [the strength of the] light sources you should use … Markus: Such things are always interfering in some way, even if you're not aware of it. As you create more and more stuff, in each project there is something that [is] like ‘wow, we haven't thought about that …’ Morten: Like when we talked to Øystein [Gilje, interviewed in 2008], then it was like ‘two boys and a camera’, but since then, we've become much more; we are trying to integrate a system where we can concentrate [on] the directing, so that some of the others have to handle many of the other things. So we are trying to narrow our focus.
Even though Markus's and Morten's references differ from Eirin's reference to the act of filmmaking, it is interesting to see how they position themselves in this excerpt. They described themselves as ‘two boys and a camera’ in 2008, which is a role they have now left to concentrate on directing. They are positioning themselves as directors despite lacking formal education. Their method is intuitive: learning from anecdotes and films made by the directors they like. This approach resembles Eirin's position, but for Markus and Morten, this process is driven by a self-didactic interest. As individual filmmakers, they perform an agency as they contextualise the learning within boundaries they set up. This specific process, builds on the tradition of self-made creative workers, and it has given Markus and Morten a specific approach to learning.
By contrasting these young filmmakers, we discover their agency is part of their learning identities along their different career paths and learning trajectories. There are also traces of what Stavrum (2009) identified in her division between elder ‘artistic’ and ‘business’ filmmakers. On a more general level, the five young filmmakers provide us with an understanding of how young adults talk about filmmaking as a creative act and how they relate creativity to learning in the early stage in their careers. Even though it can be argued that these five filmmakers are just mirroring what it means to be at different stages in their career, we illustrate how they are using their relationship to their learning context and to genres and styles as identity markers in the interviews. In doing this, they are positioning themselves in the world of filmmaking, as they are reflecting on the ways in which they want to act in and on this world. We understand this world as a figured world, as it is socially produced and culturally constructed. In their positioning as a filmmaker, norms, rules (or lack of rules), genres and styles, are deployed as cultural artefacts that mediates their position in these figured worlds. Moreover, each learning contexts have a particular set of characters and actors who are recognised by the filmmaker and in their statements about these figured worlds, they perform a specific identity which relates closely to their ideas about learning to be a filmmaker. The excerpts above give primacy to how this process takes place in relation to two different analytical topics; however, we are well aware that the practice (collaborative work) and the product (genres and styles) are highly intertwined. Thus, we include an excerpt that might indicate how Ragnhild established an identity as a filmmaker over the years; she talks about the unique creative process of making films. Excerpt 7 You actually create a whole universe, a whole world; it is very fascinating to realise that what is first written as a piece of text eventually becomes a finished [product] which in many cases has an audience. Actors become characters, and the creation process … in the end means something for the people that watch it. It can be very satisfying to watch it happen. It is very intriguing, and, along the way, you work with so many people that [are] adding their creativity to the process. Film has all the elements of both narrative and sound; there are so many elements to fit in. So it is very exciting … you work collaboratively … [and] you sit together and nobody is criticizing. I really need to work with other people; I can be creative on my own as well, but it is more fun, or the best moments come when you sit and sort of throw balls and … many crazy ideas come up, and, among them, some are quite good.
As noted in my opening section, aspiring practitioners account for a significant number of workers in the creative sector. However, their creative identities are developed within some specific structure provided by the institutional contexts in higher education (Eirin, Ragnhild and Martin) or in a creative labour market as freelancers in small companies (Markus and Morten). In these specific contexts, they have to negotiate roles in collaborative work, genres and styles as part of their future filmmaking, and in doing so they cultivate a learning identity as filmmakers.
Identity work and positioning: a final comment on curatorship
Filmmaking is a creative and collaborative practice. The sociocultural perspective underpinning the analysis in this paper pays attention to this process by using utterances from individuals in the contexts of interviews. We have argued that the notion of figured world pays attention to how individuals act in and on the world, which we understand as socially produced and culturally constructed. We have been particularly concerned with the young filmmakers' agency as they develop a learning identity in this socially and culturally constructed world.
We believe that the metaphor of curatorship captures important aspects of this practice, as it opens up a wider discussion of agency, identity and learning. Curating is a strategy that is part of young people's identity work in the digital era. There are questions of learning identity and agency at the core of this process, and we suggest an analytical perspective on the level of the individual, which enables us to see how learning identities are performed within social interaction. Conversely, we are well aware of how questions of curatorship and agency work on other analytical levels as well. As pointed by Potter, ‘the performance of this act of curatorship has become important in what Giddens (1991) has described as the self-reflexive project of identity in late modernity, useful as a means of creating what he refers to as ontological security’ (Potter, 2012: xvi). By paying attention to creativity and learning in the creative and culture sector, we claim that young people today are interesting in talking about these issues, as they might blur the boundaries between different sites of learning through their career trajectories in the new labour market. Even though this is a sector of work filled with uncertainty, there is no doubt that filmmaking is currently attracting young people. Besides working your way into the business, becoming a filmmaker is a creative act and might well be self-reflexive identity work.
The availability and affordability of filmmaking has made the possibility of creative content production available for a high number of young people across a wide range of genres and contexts. This new kind of filmmaking makes a wide range of roles available for young people, and young filmmakers' agency can be oriented towards these positions, which were not available two decades ago. We hope in the future to see more studies on how young people curate themselves as part of the longer learning trajectories they create across different contexts. In a sociocultural perspective on creativity, the findings from this article give new insight into how creative workers transform their experience and knowledge about film, the field, to create a specific learning identity as they are approaching specific domain in filmmaking. Thus, we think the findings might interest teachers within a wide range of creative domains and researchers who are interested in identity work is performed in learning trajectories over time.