Meet Joanne Kwok, who is an Undergraduate (Year 4) at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University. Joanne’s the one in the video who says her dream job is to be “Asia’s leading movie director”.

She saw our project as an opportunity for her to put her dream to work. Our brief to the SMU student teams was to produce a video that would help us promote the idea of “The Dream Job Pitch”. We wanted something that would inspire students and school-leavers to dream about what they’d like to do in their careers and to tell us in a one-minute video.

In the video produced by Joanne’s team, the premise was simple. They asked a group of youths two questions – what do you want to be and what are you studying – and the result was a rather moving collage of answers that showed the chasm between dream and reality.

We asked Joanne what gave her the idea for the video.

I took a really long time to conceptualize the video because of other projects, but I knew that I didn’t want to produce a predictable montage of interviews with people on the streets because I wanted something unique and inspiring.

The question was then: how do I get people to share their dreams without having to give an interview? I immediately thought of a personal project I’d recently done where people held up signs describing my friend, the birthday girl. It was really moving without anyone actually saying anything throughout the video. This led me to remember a video of “cardboard confessions” I’d seen on YouTube years ago, which was another super emotional and uplifting method of conveying messages without words.

On one side of the cardboard, people wrote their past lives, and on the flip side they wrote how they had turned over a new leaf. Still equally moving the second time I watched it.

Which then led to the question of, what two things can people write about for a “My Dream Job” video? Thankfully a friend had asked me not too long ago to think about what I really wanted to do with my life if I didn’t have any constraints at all.

It turned out to be one of the most heartbreaking group discussions I’d ever sat through, listening to everyone’s dreams, many that were very respectable, yet not practical in a Singaporean context. All these thoughts and memories came together in my eureka moment, and I knew I had a potentially amazing video to produce.”

Q: What were the most challenging aspects of it?

The most challenging aspect was finding people to act in the video, because everyone’s so busy and finding a common time to film 25-30 people (I had hoped, to have enough footage for a 5 minute video) was just insane. I was stressed out to the point of not being able to really function properly. I was so excited yet scared at the same time!

People had graciously taken part in my “dream survey”, which I had distributed through Facebook, and the content for the video looked amazing – all I needed was a lot of cardboard and a lot of people! Two things I could barely control.

If my group couldn’t get their hands on enough cardboard, too bad. If not enough people could turn up during my filming times (controlled by my photographer, and he was working), too bad. It really killed me inside thinking about all the things that could have gone wrong during filming, because I really wanted to see the video come to life.

Q: How long did it take for you to make it?

We filmed for a total of four hours, although each person only got ten seconds of air time or so. Preparing the cardboard for filming also took a lot of time, but that was done by my group mates, thankfully.

The video editing itself was quite extensive because I didn’t get perfect cuts (and only realized it when I was editing), so I had to work around the imperfections and make sure everything looked as close to how I had imagined the video would be.

I wasn’t sure about the soundtrack at first, although I kinda knew I wanted to use Aziatix’s “Go” because of its great beat and rather relevant lyrics. Once that was chosen, however, I had to make sure all the scene changes were on beat as well for maximum effect. The first round of editing for the full video took me about 6 hours, followed by more re-editing over the next few days. I love editing though, it’s so exciting to see my work come together slowly in front of my eyes.

Q: Did you have fun making it?

I definitely had fun making it because I knew this was going to move a lot of hearts. Anything for a social cause! I think one of the funniest things was filming the serious faces. Everyone had an issue with it, because usually people expect to smile for the camera at a comfortable distance. I forced every single actor to stand really close to the camera for a super close-up shot with a serious face – it must have been a nightmare for the self-conscious people.

Watching their instinctive smiling faces sober up when I asked them to “look serious” was really funny to watch. I think smiles breaking out on serious faces make excellent video material. Very heartwarming, very human.

Preparing the cardboard for filming was another ‘fun’ activity for the group, from the collecting (the boys went to beg the karang guni aunty for them), the cutting (one girl complained she developed biceps in the process), even the writing of the dreams was memorable because we started out quite clueless and desperate for time. Great bonding for the group.

Q: What are you studying? And what do you want to be?

I’m a Business student at SMU, doing a double major in Marketing and Corporate Communications. I actually wanted to go into Mass Comm at NTU but my parents were not supportive of such a career choice. They felt that business was a ‘safer’ option (as you can see on my cardboard confession).

I’ve always been interested in film-making and other creative professions, but my ‘science’-oriented parents could never fully understand why anyone would want to pursue these things as a career. To them it was a very ‘as a hobby’ thing.

Thankfully as a Marcomms student, I’ve been exposed to the wonderful world of advertising, particularly copywriting and creative storytelling. And of course, this project has been life-changing to undertake – adding to my portfolio of personal creative works I have amassed over the years. I hope to go into advertising, but in the long run my dream is to produce a movie with a social cause for a global audience.

Note: Winners in “The Dream Job Pitch” competition stand to win personal coaching time, a three-month job stint at TravelStart, South Africa’s leading OTA, a choice of internships at leading travel companies and a S$3,000 prize. Deadline for the one-minute video entries is May 31.