Critical Self-Reflection

I am a junior student from the University of Westminster majoring in Digital Media and Communication. When I was a child I saw the movie Avatar, it gave me a great visual and auditory shock and made me have a great curiosity about photography. However, over the years, due to some factors, I was going to choose a finance major, but by chance, I came across a camera for the first time, saw the outside world through the viewfinder and pressed the shutter. The click not only allowed me to record the beautiful moment at that time but also made me understand the path I wanted most - photography. After talking to my parents about whether I was suitable for

photography or not, I chose to pursue this comprehensive major.

After years of learning about the design, journalism, animation, audio drama and television media industries, I still found that I had a strong preference for photography and film, so during the summer holidays, I chose to do two internships in the film and television industry, during which I learned a lot about not only Hard skills but also Soft skills, which I will talk about in this internship report.

Internship at Golden Love

I worked as a video editor for the company and my role was to post-produce the wedding video - selecting and editing all the footage that had been shot. The reason why I wanted to choose this position was that I told the interviewer that

1, I was not very skilled in post-production editing and wanted to improve my editing skills.

2. I had a rather negative attitude towards editing videos at the time - I didn't have a desire to create, so I wanted to improve my attitude towards post-production through the job.

3. Weddings are a very new and serious subject for me and I felt it was important for me to be familiar with this life event.

4. I wanted to know their story (bride and groom) through the wedding video and after watching the footage I wanted to create a memorable video for them through my editing (my ideas).

5. I also wanted to find out what the difference was between a commercial video and a hobbyist video.

Therefore, after learning about my idea, my interviewer decided to give me an internship where I was able to learn to use PR systematically

This made me more familiar with using PR as software, as well as made me more comfortable with using PR later in school.

In addition to this, I watched the company's previous wedding videos and gradually understood the whole process of the video, it was just like a wedding, I needed to edit around the story, from the beginning of the reception to the preparation of the wedding party, the wedding party and the end of the wedding party. As the wedding video is different from other videos, it involves a multi-camera This meant that I had to review a lot of footage at the beginning, but my team leader told me the trick to editing the wedding reception, which was to see if the MC was in the picture when I was screening the footage. This allowed me to understand that in future when dealing with footage for videos, I could sort the footage by thinking about what the theme of the video was and thus whether this main object appeared in the footage, which allowed me to be more efficient as I would not be checking the videos one by one. As a result, the video at the beginning of the wedding reception became the easiest part for me to complete.

In addition to the normal editing of videos, I was introduced to another type of editing - fast cutting, which is a modern wedding feature that records and quickly edits all the details of the wedding day. It also requires many videographers, following the bride and groom in separate locations, filming a series of processes on the day, such as the bride's make-up, the decoration of the bridal room, the dressing up of the wedding car, the groom receiving the bride and groom going home, and editing the captured highlights into a film, either for live broadcast to all family and friends before the ceremony begins, or to be put on the whole video for the client. But I was still very new to the field and when it came to which material I should sift through, I started to hesitate, which caused my progress to be very slow. So my team leader gave me a talk and she told me that normally a qualified wedding editor should have a time requirement of three days to produce the main film and to learn for myself to judge the important camera positions and which footage is the most important. The most basic and crucial feature of video editing is high quality and speed so that you can grow and break through on the road of editing, and to achieve this effect is to give yourself a concept of time to constantly force yourself to be able to make the most suitable choice. In the past, when working on weddings, the material was different for each scene, and the editing had to be done during the day before the ceremony started, if it wasn't done then it was the responsibility of the whole company. That's why Golden love has been able to outperform other companies in the Chinese wedding market. So since then, I have incorporated time management into my work and as I edit each part of the video, I will record the time and analyses what I did not do well.

However, it won't be all smooth sailing at work. Colour mixing is the most important aspect of post-editing, and in my previous video editing cases, I usually like to colour the video in a warm tone because I think it makes people feel comfortable, but when I finished the video for the team leader to check, the team leader criticized me once, and this is what she said: “I know you have your artistic ideas and I know you have your artistic ideas and creations, but please don't put your subjective ideas into a commercial video, it's not the same thing. What we want to do is not to say how good the video looks, but how appropriate the colour is to the client. The biggest problem you have now is that you are still working with the mentality of a student and not a worker. At school you can ask your teachers, ask your classmates or ask for help on the internet, whereas in the workplace most of the things you need to figure out yourself, as well as your finished product is also different from school, it's not the higher the score the better, but the more it fits the client's needs the better. For you now., art can be work, but work rarely takes art into account， when you have reached a certain level of strength and insight, your style and your art will be your selling point.”

I have learned a lot during this internship.

For a qualified post-production video worker.

1, to always race against time, the most important thing in editing video (especially commercial video) is efficiency, such as screening material for use, selecting images, and constantly challenging yourself to edit faster each time to make yourself more familiar with different types of videos

2, at the same time as colour mixing, their own subjective cannot interfere too much with the entire commercial video, because the commercial video is more the pursuit of the human eye to see the real tone, a single-minded use of their aesthetic will cause the consequences of customer dislike.

3, the biggest difference between video workers and video enthusiasts is that the former is to think about the needs of the client to produce the most suitable works, while the latter is to think in their preferred style to make others like their own video.

The core difference between a profession and a hobby is not whether it can make money, but whom it serves. Is the same skill used for self-entertainment or exchange? The different people you serve require a completely different mindset, and a different direction of skill development.

So after this internship, I think my mindset has changed, because a lot of people were saying not to turn what people love into a job, otherwise they will lose what they love in the tropics. For me, the core difference between a career and a hobby is not whether it makes money, but whom it serves. Whether the same skills are used for self-indulgence or in exchange. I love photography because the moment I press the shutter, I subjectively give it meaning so that the photograph can be linked to something in my memory. Professional photography, on the other hand, is made so that it can fit the needs of the client.

So I decided to go into filmmaking because it would give me the interest to learn more advanced photography techniques and also expose me to a more professional photographic work industry. For great photography, it is the depth of feeling, not the depth of field, that is important.