"We want you to make a movie"

Image Courtesy of arialm.blogspot.com

Last summer, I got my first internship. Woohoo!

I got placed in Air Liquide's Electronic's Headquarters in Dallas, Texas.  This plant "refines" all of the oxygen, argon, nitrogen, and hydrogen for Texas Instrument's Headquarters...basically.  There's a lot of gas flowing through these pipes...no pun intended.

So I was the intern. Basically, I was expecting  to copy papers, write up a few reports, crunch a few numbers, identify pipes/valves, etc, etc.

One day, I get a call from two different people.  First one is from the director of training.  Basically, he trains everyone within Electronics.  Really nice guy.  Then, I get a call from the head of operations.  They ask for a meeting (remember, I am the intern, not a lot is expected from me...so why would I be getting a call from the Head of Operations...hmmmm). They sit me down and say,

"We want you to make a movie about *insert safety jargon here*; we want it to be about an hour long, and *enter topics here* need to be discussed."

Oh, did I mention that they were willing to pay someone $15,000 to make this video? Yeah....

I was very confused on many different levels...

1. My major is Mechanical Engineering. Do I know anything about movie making? No really.
2. They want this movie to be an hour. I know there's a lot of work that goes into a 30-second commercial...let alone a 1-hour safety video.
3. Basically, I had no budget. Priceless.

So Rule Number 1 for your future internship: Never say "I can't/I'm not willing to do _____."

They knew my major was in engineering. They really didn't expect much out of the video (*psss* they were expecting the intern to make the video). They gave me some tools, threw out some ideas (while I talked about some of my own), and we went from there.  (Oh, and another side note: since I was from LA, they thought that I had more movie-making skills than the average person...hahaha)

So I did some research, compiled my Powerpoint slides with Windows Movie Maker, and did my best.  And guess what? I showed my video to the President of Electronics, and guess what? He liked it.

Never say you can't/won't.  You might just learn something, and earn brownie points :-P

-Serena

PS. I never mentioned that I, personally, narrated this movie...It's really strange to edit your own voice recording...It's just weird.