Video editor Marina Shifrin came up with a creative way to quit her job at Taiwanese animation company, the New York native posting a dance video she filmed in the office at 4 a.m. to YouTube, set to Kanye West’s song “Gone.”
The video has now gone viral.
Called “An Interpretive Dance For My Boss Set To Kanye West's Gone,” the dance video features clips of Shifrin getting down in various parts of the office, along with subtitles explaining she’s decided to quit. Shifrin also wrote an entry on Wordpress blog entitled “Journalism is Dead (To Me)” in which she outlines her grievances with her now former company that she claims she put hours and hours of creative energy and work, only to be told by her boss: “Make deadlines, not art.”
“I am not saying journalists are monsters, but the atmosphere of today’s society — everything has to be first, loud and sensational — is taking the discretion out of journalism,” Shifrin writes. “Sensational stories have always been a part of the dark underbelly of journalism. But with the saturation of news providing platforms on the market, these sensational stories are multiplying, rising, strengthening and trending. Now machines and buttons inhabit journalist’s tool boxes. Clicks are King. The smartest journalists not only know this rule, but they respect it. Smart journalists like my boss.”
Though she admires and respects her boss, Shifrin writes that she doesn’t feel she can be as good as her peers when it comes to gaining the most clicks and writing the most crazy headlines. In a twist of irony, Shifrin’s “quitting dance” video has gone viral, now part of the “dark underbelly of click journalism” she details in her blog. Maybe she's better at generating viral content than she gives herself credit for.
Nonetheless, Shifrin decided to leave with a message that promoted the spirit of creative videos, as she made one that focused on content rather than one that was simply trying to garner clicks, though it has been viewed on YouTube over 800,000 times since it was posted on Sept. 28.
"I understood that it was a risk, but I never named the company or my boss and I mean, have you seen my dancing? How can anyone take that seriously," Shifrin said in a Skype interview with the Huffington Post.
Though she didn't name her company in her blog or video, Shifrin is now officially a former employee of Next Media Animation. She plans to move back to the U.S. and find a company that values creativity in their employees.
