Take this job… and dance it?
Marina Shifrin’s 4:30 am “I Quit” dance video has received over one million hits on YouTube so far.
Shifrin, 25, formerly worked at the popular Next Media Animation studios in Taiwan as a video editor.
NMA is well known for its satirical take on news events.
Apparently Shifrin stopped enjoying her shifts at NMA — prompting her to produce a farewell/resignation “interpretive dance” set to Kanye West’s “Gone” and filmed in her former office. Shifrin originally made the video for family and friends but she decided to post it publicly two days ago to force herself “to a more creative carer path,” which apparently includes doing stand-up.
The subtitles on the video explain that “I work for an awesome company that produces news videos. For almost two years I’ve sacrificed my relationships, time and energy for this job. My boss… only cares about quantity and how many views each video gets. So figured I’d make one video of my own. To focus on the content instead of worry about the views… and to let my boss know I quit!”
According to NBC News , “Shifrin started working for Next Media Animation in March 2012 in the United States, then moved to Taipei in November. Although she had been planning to leave the company in about a month anyway, when her year-long contract was up, the video accelerated her plans. ‘Obviously the management isn’t really thrilled with me right now,’ she said.”
The Kansas City Star reports that the University of Missouri School of Journalism grad said that “she was sick of writing for ‘clicks’… and felt the overall quality of journalism in general has suffered greatly in recent years.” Shifrin delves more deeply into her views on the contemporary state of journalism on her website .
Her former NMA boss told NBC News that “I do care about views, because advertising pays the bills… but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about quality… We gave her assignments and opportunities to be creative. She never took them.”
NMA subsequently released its own “Gone” video:
