Does Taking Initiative Mean Switching from Video Production Intern to Janitor?
Yes. Yes, it does. As a video production intern, I am very grateful for the number of ways I have naturally taken initiative on the job from color tagging photos to organizing hard-drives. However, the one unique and unexpected way I took initiative in the last days of my production internship was taking on the role of a video production janitor in the lofty task of cleaning the production equipment closet.
What lead me to take this initiative on one of the last days of my internship was after I jokingly made a comment to one of my bosses saying “the next set of should organize the closet”. Then, the another leader entered the production cave to go search for a tool he needed in the closet. However, because the person could not even enter the closet due to the messiness level being at an all time high, he could not find it. In fact, he made a comment about how it would be lovely if someone would clean it. Though there was a project that my video editor and I were working on for our boss, I left my partner take control on part of the project while I transformed this closet into a safezone.
Four thousand seconds later, the closet was clean. Clean in a way that there was no more unopened packaged snacks, random rods poking through the shelves, and finally, was able to be walked in. The closet actually resonated organizational peace which was something no one in the office could have truly said, or felt until this very moment.
The way I try my best to live my life every single day is on what Jesus said, “I came not to be served, but to serve”. Serving looks different every single day based on the situations God places me in. The more I practice serving, the more natural it becomes. I am very grateful to have taken on the role as a video production janitor on one of my last days in the internship.
For anyone who is interested in having the quality of their videos be more identifiable, feel free to read the quick blurb on how I color tag my videos and photos:
Typically it involves me color tagging the videos, which is going through footage and on the Mac, tagging, or highlighting the videos with a specific color. For me, red signals bad footage, yellow symbolizes mediocre footage, and green means stellar, crisp, on-point b-roll.
Additionally, if you are interested in understanding the complexity of hard drive organization when working with multiple different people, continue reading:
Another way I have taken initiative is cleaning and organizing the hard drives. For free-lance photographers and videographers, this might be the bread and butter to any project you work on. However, when you are not working for yourself but working for an organization, and furthermore, are given hard drives that have been worked on by a number of people you probably have never met, it is best to expect that these hard-drives will be disorganized. I am grateful I had a chance to improve the state of organization for a harddrive I was working on in July right before a really large event the church was spearheading. Decluttering this harddrive became essential for organizing all the footage we captured. More importantly, if the harddrive is not organized the way that best suits the team from the beginning, it can derail the team when importing and locating footage once your project is set up in one of the editing programs in the Adobe Suite.