Having a job at Juniata as a student employee has created many different stories for me. I have worked for the soccer team collecting balls on the sidelines during the game, I have packed backpacks with food for students at the local elementary school, and I had assumed the Video Production Team (VPT) would be a similar experience. I would learn and develop skills that I can use in the future. Better yet, hone ones I didn’t even know I had. However, no campus job could have prepared me for what the VPT had in store.
One of the activities we take part in the VPT is called monthlies. Every monthly meeting we are split into groups and assigned a project, for example, our most recent is to make a spooky video because it is October. We work on these projects as groups, planning filming, acting, etc., and the final product is shared with the team in our next meeting. Out of all parts of the process, the most enjoyable aspect for me is working with my team members, creating and watching our ideas come to life. Sometimes they will throw in a requirement, such as including a Dutch angle, in our project to help us get more practice and gain more experience. These are often challenging, but they lead us to find new and imaginative ways to incorporate them into our projects.
One of our monthly projects had us making our own movie trailers from randomly assigned genres. My team was assigned a teen movie, and of course we had to implement the classic clichés with our own unique twists. When filming, there was this one scene where our “mean girls” shoved the main character into a wall, having her drop a large pile of scarily huge college books we had collected. To perfect the scene, we had to shoot it a couple of times, and by that I mean she had to be “shoved” five times for five consecutive scenes to make sure we got it right. In short, we mean business at the VPT, and it is not without casualties along the way.
An inside joke between members of the VPT is that no one actually knows we exist. Let me explain. We have a desk located right next to the Technology Solutions Center (TSC). This results in frequent IT questions directed our way, which secretly startles and confuses us, and we often find ourselves in the laughable predicament of having to explain that we are not IT, but in fact the VPT. As you can imagine, this does wonders for our confidence as to the importance of our jobs to our fellow students. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I am still learning the depth of knowledge that the VPT has to offer me daily and am confident that in the future the VPT will have a more prevalent presence on campus.
