In a corner of a cavernous hangar in Buckinghamshire, a group of Jedi are honing their lightsaber skills, Deadpool and Chewbacca are posing for photos, while a squad of Imperial stormtroopers make their presence felt by arresting a passing reporter.

Pinewood Studios is pulling out all the stops – including a stunt display at the underwater stage famous for scenes including the sinking Venetian villa in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale – to wow young attendees at the third edition of Europe’s largest free careers fair for the film industry.

And just a few miles down the road at Warner Bros studios in Leavesden, home of the Harry Potter franchise and where the latest DC blockbuster Supergirl is being filmed, training facility CrewHQ is almost 18 months into its mission to upskill workers and entice the next generation of film and TV production talent.

Behind the scenes of the UK’s £6bn film and high-end TV production industry, second only in size to the US, the industry is battling with an increasing shortage of skills.

The issue is with so-called below-the-line jobs, behind the camera – carpentry and set building, hair and makeup, accountancy and, in the words of one executive, “anything with the words ‘artificial intelligence’”.

“Skills is a big issue, second only to the potential impact of AI that I have seen come up the most,” says Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair of the select committee of MPs conducting an inquiry into the state of the UK film and high-end TV production sector.

“The sector relies on a huge army of talented people behind the scenes. We keep having skills mentioned as a big issue, but below-the-line skills don’t get spoken about. We need a masterplan and a widening of the net to get people from a more diverse range of backgrounds into the industry.”

At Pinewood – where the number of exhibitors has doubled to 50 since the first Futures Festival in 2022 and includes the George Lucas-founded, Disney-owned special effects giant Industrial Light & Magic – one company cites estimates that, in the lighting sector alone, as many as 500 workers are close to retirement age and will need replacing.

While initiatives such as those run by Pinewood and Leavesden are doing their bit when it comes to attracting the next generation of workers, film and TV has one enduring problem – it seems everyone wants to be a star.

“I’m actually an actor, so I thought I’d turn up, speak to people, network, get involved in anything I can, really,” says Harmony Reid, 24. “I’m interested in creating, maybe directing, but I’m a presenter also.” However, she concedes that events like this one are focused on work “predominantly behind the camera”.

Attempts to woo young people into production roles have been hindered by a lack of up-to-date figures from the industry. The British Film Institute’s 2022 Skills Review estimated that, based on the growth of the industry, almost 21,000 more full-time-equivalent employees would be needed by this year.

However, the market has changed dramatically since then and the BFI no longer stands by this figure, but it is yet to publish an updated review.

Industry skills body ScreenSkills, whose testimony at the culture select committee chair Dinenage recently characterised as “underwhelming”, is working on the first all-encompassing look at gaps and shortages, due to be published next month.

“Production is fragmented and everyone goes their separate ways afterwards,” says Jordan Fisher, training manager at 3D scanning company Clear Angle, which has worked on films including Deadpool & Wolverine and the sequels to Gladiator and Dune. “Because of that, sometimes it feels like it is no one’s responsibility. That is why events like at Pinewood are important.”

A mix of factors buffeting the UK film and TV sector in recent years have made skills shortages a complex problem.

The industry feasted for a decade on mega-budgets provided by Netflix and its rivals in pursuit of global screen dominance – halcyon times that led to huge expansion. The high-end TV market ballooned from £640m in 2012 to a peak of £5.1bn in 2022, driven by the post-Covid need to restock content libraries.

The industry experienced huge cost inflation – and profits – partly fuelled by frenetic demand for workers and companies to keep that content pipeline flowing. Film and TV studio announcements and expansions became the norm amid a production space squeeze.

However, in the last three years streamers have cut profligate spending to focus on sustainable profitability, while the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes wreaked further havoc.

At the same time, the domestic UK TV market hit what bosses at ITV and Channel 4 called the worst advertising recession since 2008. The resulting cuts to content budgets drove many producers to shut, merge or struggle to stay viable.

Recent testimony to the culture select committee has amplified the picture of a market in contraction – from the star and director of hit series Wolf Hall taking a big pay cut, to the BBC shelving premium TV projects due to a lack of co-funding deals.

Many new studio-building projects have been scrapped, with investors looking at new growth areas such as data centres, which are also part of the plan for a smaller-scale studio expansion by Pinewood.

So, given there has been such market contraction, shouldn’t there be a surfeit of talent to choose from? The issue is complicated by an uneven recovery that means the abilities of those out of work do not necessarily match where the growth now lies.

While investment in film production, driven by Hollywood blockbusters, bounced back last year to pre-pandemic levels at £2.1bn, the work crisis continues in the TV industry. High-end TV spending last year was up about £1bn on pre-pandemic levels, at £3.4bn, but the industry is still struggling with the “reset” in the amount of work – and for the vast majority made for less than £1m an hour, tight broadcaster budgets mean work remains precarious for many.

Last month, a report by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre found that nearly 60,000 creative industries workers were not fully proficient in their roles. It said a particular challenge in addressing the growing skills gap – up 15,000 since 2017 – related to the introduction of new technology, including but not limited to AI. It found that 65% of “hard to fill” vacancies in the industry were attributable to skills shortages.

Laura Mansfield, the chief executive of ScreenSkills, compared the situation to a rockpool: “Some areas of the industry are underwater, some have slivers of water and some are as dry as rock. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all tidy answer and that means variability in the situation around skills.

“We did have skill shortages, where there was poaching like mad, where people got pulled in too fast and promoted too quickly and were exposed. But now we are much more in a universe that is about skills gaps, which is different.”

The industry also continues to lobby heavily for a change to the government’s apprenticeship levy, which employers with a wage bill of over £3m pay into, because much of the film and TV industry is project-based using freelance workers, which makes it difficult to meet the criteria for taking on an apprentice on a 12-month contract. Nevertheless, despite the challenges, there are hopes that a new generation of potential workers is waiting in the wings who may not even know their perfect job exists.

“I didn’t know this was a thing,” says João Villar, 19, at the Pinewood skills fair. “It is mind-blowing. It is really cool for people to find out that some of these niche jobs even exist … It is so inspiring.”