Friend of a friend set up an interview with this company, im sure they had good intentions...
So you walk into this facility in picadilly and step inside to meet this dark, dark room with marble floors. The room is vast and spacious.
There were people in 1940s attire milling around in this room, there was a man sitting at a grand piano, another man peering out of the window past the drawn, heavy curtains which went from floor to ceiling.
The only light source in this room was on an antique desk at the far end of the room, presided over by two burley russian men in black suits. They didn't speak much, they took my picture with a webcam and asked me to sign my name on their register and sit down.
I took my seat, next to the man peering out of the window.
I then realised it was a manequin. So was the man playing the piano. All of them were mannequins.
A girl came downstairs and fetched me and we took one of the lifts up to the higher floors. The other lift was out of order due to the 10 to 15 manequins heaving their way into it.
She took me to a room with many vintage tv set screens playing black and white footage of something. The content was quite lurid and sometimes a bit unsettling.
They gave me a plate of food from the kitchens, to tide me over while I waited for the producer who was to interview me.
He arrived, sat down and told me about the project a little, he mentioned that they had over 700 hours of footage that they needed to edit down, I asked him how long the films were and he said 2 to 3 hours each. I asked him how many films they intended to make, he said maybe 3. At this point I realised this project was going to be insane, but carried on anyway.
He took me upstairs to meet some other guy i'd be working with, they didn't really have any questions they just told me they needed an IT guy to fix the place up. They didn't show me anything about the infrastructure, they didn't tell me what I'd be working with at all.
What he did do was get up and go to the balcony for a smoke mid interview.
There was no furniture in the rooms really. The place looked like a once very nice building that had been gutted cept for the pool table green carpets and mahogany trim. Internet cables trailing all over the place. IT looked like a disaster area.
Honestly I was just curious as to what exactly they were trying to do, I didn't know what the film they making was or the stories about its creation, it was all unknown and when I left I didn't know much more. They didn't give me the name of the film, I had to find that out later myself.
They basically explained the expectations of the job to me for 5 minutes and gave the that look of "when can you start?" But I kept asking them questions because I wasnt comfortable with the questions.
I thought it might be interesting so I offered to work part time for them and we'd see from there. He said full time only, I said no thank you. At which point he got up and left.
After searching them up on google I managed to find some pretty damning stuff of a similar nature. And some vile stories of abuse within company. From what I saw and the manner of some of the people I absolutely believe it.
