We recently connected with Rose Eckes and have shared our conversation below.

Rose, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Because I’m in the film industry, a lot of people assume that my job is based almost entirely on creativity. While that is part of it, there are so many analytical tasks that I do every day to create a film that people end up seeing.
As for the creative aspects, I don’t think I ever learned them necessarily. I grew up as an only child, creating worlds and stories to keep myself entertained, and I guess I just never stopped.
The day-to-day aspects that go into producing a film are definitely learned, and there are many things that I am still learning. I am learning the ins and outs of producing at the Savannah College of Art and Design. This has surrounded me with so many people who have worked in the field and who can share their real-life experiences, mistakes, and lessons with me. I have taken nuggets of information that I use regularly from every film professor that I have had, but at the end of the day, you really don’t learn how to do it until you just jump in and try it. I didn’t feel knowledgeable or confident in my skills as a producer until I was on my first set. You can sit in classes and read books forever, but you won’t really know how to produce a film until you actually do it. So much of producing is about solving problems as they come up and coordinating a bunch of moving parts that you can’t plan for everything that could happen. You have to take what you know from others’ stories and your own experiences and make the decision that you believe is best in the moment. It sounds cheesy, but a lot of filmmaking is about following your gut.
I spent the first couple of years in college sitting in classrooms, just trying to soak up all of the information that I could. While I do feel like that benefitted me in ways, it meant that I didn’t step foot on a set and really start learning how I manage my craft until about a year and a half into my studies. I believe that surrounding yourself with people who know more than you and are better than you is how you grow, and I know that if I had done that sooner, I would have learned much faster than I did.
At the end of the day, producing comes down to the ability to organize, communicate, and stay level-headed in a high-energy environment. Learning how to communicate differently with each person that I work with to make them feel heard and appreciated while still accomplishing the task at hand is probably the most important aspect of my job because I know that projects can’t get done without every single person on my team.

Rose, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up spending most of my time in the theatre program at my school. I started acting and fell in love with it; it was my favorite part of every day, but it was never something that I looked at and thought I could make a career out of. Back then, it was more of an outlet for me. In my sophomore year of high school, I began hanging out in the booth, and I learned how to run the light board. While I kept acting after that, I learned that what I really loved was sitting behind the scenes and helping the production run. I got into stage management from there and was hooked, but it was still something that I saw as more of a hobby than a “real job.” It wasn’t until I took a film class in the second half of my junior year that I realized that this was really something that I could do, and, honestly, after that, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.
After high school, I enrolled at the Savannah College of Art and Design as a film major. I didn’t have a clue what getting into the film industry really entailed; I just knew that I wanted to tell stories to young women like myself for the rest of my life. I originally came in hoping to be a Director of Photography, but that quickly changed when I had a professor look at me and just say, “No. You’re a producer. I knew it the first day that you were in my class.” I realized that I could take the skills that I learned and the feelings that I had about being a stage manager in high school and transform that into a film career.
My day job is as a studio manager for a photography company, which has allowed me to grow and shape many of the same skills that I use for producing while still using those artistic aspects of my brain that make my job so special. What I spend much of my time doing, however, is producing short films, mainly in the psychological thriller and fantasy horror genres. I create stories that focus on the dynamics within different kinds of relationships, as well as what it looks like to go through some of the more difficult parts of your teens and twenties. I tell relatable stories in a way that the average person usually hasn’t experienced to entertain my audiences while simultaneously reflecting their own emotions through my characters.
At the end of the day, I want young women like me to see my work and feel a sense of catharsis in it while still feeling like it is taking them out of their day-to-day lives and into another world for the length of the story. If I can accomplish that with even just a few of my audience members, then I believe that my work has been successful.
The most important thing for me in my work is my people. This industry is known for filmmakers stepping on each other to get to the top, and I hope to spend my career working to combat that. I want every single person who joins any of my projects to know that they matter above all else. I want to remind people that the people around them come before any job or final product, and I want to remind every single one of my team members that they are appreciated, not just for the work they can do for me, but also just because of the people they are.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Witnessing the passion and excitement that exudes from the people that I work with is the most rewarding part of my job. When I’m working to develop a story or a script, there is usually an initial vision of it playing in my head. Based on my experience, that initial vision never looks like the outcome, and I am so grateful for that. When a story lives in your head, it is YOUR story, but when I send out scripts and bring people onto projects, it stops being my story or the story of the director, it becomes EVERYONE’s story because everyone’s talents and creativity go into it. It is the best feeling in the world when I spend months working and reworking a story and just staring at words on a paper, and then it gets into the hands of the crew or I hear it read out loud in auditions, and it becomes something completely new. Getting to watch words come to life as actual, visual stories is my favorite part of my job. Watching a story evolve through each step of the process is amazing!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think the biggest thing that I have had to work to unlearn is the idea that what I do “isn’t a real job.” I grew up thinking that to fulfill my potential, I would have to be some kind of corporate employee. I believed that making movies was more of a hobby and that I would be wasting that logical side of my brain if I pursued it as a career. The more time that I have spent getting into this industry, the more I have learned how completely untrue that assumption is. At the end of the day, the film industry is a business, and to navigate it, I have had to work that logical side of my brain every day. Despite this, there is still the idea that I’m not truly working. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that to be on a real, successful career path, it couldn’t feel like fun and play. I spend quite a bit of time reminding myself that having fun in my job is not only a good thing but also the goal.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @rose_eckes_88

Image Credits

wrongendofthebladeBTS-57- Photographer Spirit Hess
TheLastSip_Day4_BTS-72- Photographer Zena Johnson
10- Photographer Cate Kraack
39- Photographer Ryleigh Sandefur
TheLastSip_Day4_BTS-117- Photographer Zena Johnson
IMG_8991- Photographer Svaja Nicklin
Screenshot 2025-02-11 at 10.34.30 PM- Still from the short film “Shadows” directed by Max Hollis, Director of Photography Sam Rewolinski
IMG_2739- Photographer Jacob Braxxton