A Week of Work Experience with Skeleton

It's often made out that work experience is a week of photocopying and making the coffees! So when it came to organising my own work experience, I didn't get my hopes up.

However, these uninspiring and meaningless tasks were not what I was subjected to at Skeleton, at all!

With a strong interest in media and a love of creativity, Skeleton was recommended to me thanks to a  teacher who thought video production would be just up my street.

After confirming my work experience, I was very excited to receive a timetable detailing all of the activities and tasks I would take on during my time at Skeleton. I felt optimistic in discarding everything I'd heard about a week spent photocopying - and I was certainly right to!

I had the best week at Skeleton, learning all about video production, blog writing and using videos in marketing, all of which were really interesting. I was also involved in several current projects which was great; I felt properly involved and actually useful! Some other jobs I tried out were:

• Storyboarding
• Blog Writing
• Production Assistance
• Marketing Assistance
• and Editing

I had little experience in most of these areas before I went, so I was keen to get involved as much as possible. And by the end of the week, I had pretty much had a go at everything! Of course I was no where near as good as the Skeleton group! But it was still interesting and a lot of fun to try each of them out. It was great to work with a great team of professionals throughout the week and having a go myself at some of the jobs that they do.

After an introduction and a morning spent watching some videos, I spent the afternoon creating a storyboard from a script and although drawing is not a particular strength of mine(!), I really enjoyed being creative and using my imagination to design an animation. 

I also wrote a blog post analysing an IKEA advert. I enjoy writing so this was fun to write and I was also able to develop some of my media analysis skills which was really useful. And it got published on their website, which is pretty cool (just click the link above to have a read)!

Editing footage which was used a couple of years ago for an NCN cinema advert and rebuilding the clips into my own video was possibly the highlight of my week.

It was amazing to work with up-to-date software and fast-running computers for a change. I was unsure on my first day when I was told that "after using a dual monitor set up, you'll never want to go back!" but after I week, I now realise how true that is!

Thanks to Skeleton, I am now also an expert on free stock image websites and the best places in Nottingham to go for an office Christmas outing! 

From conversations about High School Musical, to Epic Fail Videos and avocado bathrooms, the Skeleton team are such a friendly group of people and made me feel welcome from the start. I have learnt so much in my week here and I'm going to take away many skills for the future. They have also reassured me that work, as long as you are surrounded by a great team of people, really can be an enjoyable experience.