Anna Huth, PhD, together with her platform team4set has been selected among the 12 chosen startups of this year’s EFM Startups edition as part of the European Film Market (EFM).
EFM Startups is a five-day platform (February 13–17, during the Berlinale) dedicated to showcasing cutting-edge media technologies, connecting visionary startups with leaders of the film industry, and opening doors to funding and strategic partnerships.
team4set is an example of a rare combination of technological innovation with production practice and research into how film crew hiring decisions really work.
It is an expert networking platform for the film industry, designed to solve a real market problem: how film crews are built in practice in Europe. Unlike classic job boards, team4set works on the basis of mechanisms prevalent in production reality: recommendations, professional and geographical proximity, as well as real experience and trust built on the set.
The team4set approach stems from the research background of its founder. Anna Huth, PhD, is a long-standing researcher at Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Katowice, where she carries out research on how crew hiring decisions are made in the audio-visual industry under time pressure, having incomplete information and high production risk.
Research shows that the decisions about ‘who’s fit for the set’ are rarely based solely on one’s résumé or job title. Instead, they rely on so-called tacit knowledge and heuristics, such as assessing the credibility of recommendations, the predictability of on-set behaviour, stress resilience, and overall team fit. It is precisely these mechanisms—embedded in the day-to-day practices of producers, production managers, and department heads—that team4set transforms into a structured, industry-specific system for building trust and reducing employment-related risk.
