Hello, my name is Nut. I’m a videographer. I was contacted by my friends Mike and Cherry to film a five-day video project together. While Mike filmed the surrounding setting, not focusing on our employer, Cherry managed the crew and organized the shooting, but she wasn’t given the specific filming location or places to go beforehand.

We did the shooting in Chiang Rai for two days and in Chiang Mai for three days. When I received the project, there was no storyboard. For a video production project, not having a storyboard is quite challenging. But it was worth a try.

Finally, we got to meet Jerry, our employer for this project. Here’s Chong, a violinist who never ceases to smile. Chong lived in Thailand for five years, which made it easier to communicate with each other. This is Anita. She’s here to help out with this project.

We started this project without a clear direction of how our final product was going to look like. The only thing we knew was that it was about education, and we mainly filmed Jerry and our conversations with him.

After the first day, we still couldn’t picture how our video was going to look like. Nonetheless, we tried to film as best as we could. We recorded whatever we thought would be useful without really knowing if we were going to end up using the footage or not.

On the second day, we started the day with a meeting where we finally understood that we were in Chiang Rai to simply rest and prepare for our filming in Chiang Mai. Cherry then quickly organized for Jerry and his friends to travel around Chiang Rai. As we traveled around, we still continued to film just in case we would use it for this project.

We went back to Chiang Mai on the third day and started filming and recording Jerry’s meetings on the dining table, talking about education. As we filmed his meetings, we also listened and learned from him. Jerry would always ask us for our opinions as well. In the end, we came to the conclusion together that the heart of education is communication between the teacher and the student.

On the forth day of the production, the stress was slightly getting to us, because we weren’t really sure how Jerry wanted the video to turn out like. We were confused. Our time was almost running up and the deadline was the next day, but even after editing the video since the first day, we could not picture the final product.

We showed the drafted video to Jerry and finally got a clearer guide from him. He said to continue going in the direction we were going for the past four days, and to not worry how the final product was like.

He told us to forget the meetings footage we took which was from our first briefing, but to create a new direction of our own, because he trusted us. The things we filmed was for us to learn. This was a new way of thinking for us because of how our normal working style. Normally, we would work with the guideline given so that we could produce the best final product for our employer. Jerry has completely changed the way we view our work and gave us new perspectives with a term he used, ‘Sticky Team’.

Explaining the word Sticky Team here is a playful word that came up during our first day of work, something like “OK, don’t worry, we will stick together until the project is completed. Without knowing what the work will be like.”

We spent the time learning from each other, without thinking too much about it and doing it in the way we wanted to. In the end, we came to understand that learning does not only come from books, or from classrooms, but comes in different forms. Learning starts from taking the knowledge into consideration and applying it further on.

Who knows, sometimes our work experience that feels so ordinary for us, might be something new and useful for others.