Internship Experience - Temasek Junior College

By Sylvia, Jessie, Chang Hao, Natalie, Samiksha

When we first came into the office, we had no idea about what a “social enterprise” is and what to expect at Make The Change. However, having spent the past one month interning here, it really changed our perception of how social businesses work and it was an eye-opening experience for all of us indeed. We managed to experience multiple “first times” through this programme, such as participating in product photoshoots and videography, learning how to draw and animate our own GIFs on Procreate as well as being part of the DAFA filming.

For the product shoot, we went outside of the office to the Clarke Quay shophouses in week 2 to capture photos of the products. We were accompanied by our MTC mentor, Jade, and another MTC staff Amanda, who was part of the designing team and gave us tips about photography. She mentioned that we have to take photos in a way that is attractive to the eye in order to make the product stand out. She told us that lighting and colour matching is crucial when it comes to taking photos and that we also had to take note of the compositions of photos.

For the product shots, we used cameras and our phones to capture pictures of the pouches with the colourful shophouses as the background, making the photos more vibrant and colourful which will be more appealing to people. Not only did we take the product shots using our phones and cameras, we also had the opportunity to model for the product shots. Ultimately, the product shoot was very successful as we were able to capture many aesthetically pleasing photos of the pouches that would definitely attract people’s attention easily. These photos would then be used for the posts that we will be working on for DFG’s Instagram page, brightening the previously dull feed as a result.

As for what we learnt in terms of videography, there were mainly 2 instances in which we could have hands-on experience. In the first week, we had the opportunity to participate in and witness the behind the scenes of the DAFA filming, an ad for the school. It was intriguing seeing the huge camera equipment and how the camera crew worked, taking multiple takes to get the “perfect” shot.

As interns, we had minor roles, being the students in the background in the re-enactment of the workshop lesson, while Jade taught snippets of the class on Media Literacy. We observed how proper lighting was a necessity for filming, and the way that there was artificial lighting and light tents set up around this professional set. Later on, we tried for ourselves, filming an advertisement using the iPads from MTC’s office.

We considered camera angles and lighting, so we tried to find a spot with good natural lighting to film, and we took a top-view shot later which also panned to closeups of the products, with one of us kneeling on top of the table to get the shot. Making sure to avoid having distracting background items, we were able to make the products in the video more eye-catching. We incorporated clips of the products in use to better market the products as being useful and more attractive, and later on added captions of short catchphrases in text form on the videos as well as edited the clips to be more cohesive. Ultimately the process of filming products was indeed enlightening, allowing us new insights on product filming and marketing.

Moving on to the marketing of the products (denim pouches), we wanted more people to know about Design for Good and we had to think of ways to make this happen. We decided that we wanted to spice up DFG’s Instagram feed with more vibrant colours as we found the current ones slightly plain and dull (mainly due to the posts having a white background).

Thus, we made use of warmer tones (like reds, pinks and yellows) and re-designed all the posts using apps or websites. Since we also wanted our posts to be informative but digestible at the same time, we split the lengthy words into different posts so that readers could easily take in pieces of information without being overwhelmed by the long chunks of text.

In order to boost engagement on DFG’s social media platforms, we had to use more hashtags and make sure our posts had more likes, comments, and shares. According to Instagram’s algorithm, the more likes, posts and hashtags a post has, the more people the post would reach. We made sure there were many likes by sharing the posts in our personal accounts. This successfully managed to increase the number of likes the posts had. Moreover, we also decided to make use of Instagram stories. We made a sustainability bingo template and a trivia quiz that our followers can participate in. By doing so, when users reshare the template, this could then reach a wider audience and more people would be able to find out about our account as well as the whole Jeans for Change movement.

Ultimately our experience at Make The Change was very fulfilling, eye-opening and refreshing, especially under the guidance of Jade, who helped us along our internship journey with graciousness and kindness. We feel that this internship has well-trained us for future work experiences and we would like to thank MTC for giving us such great once-in-a-lifetime opportunities as interns, and teaching us about things we would not have the chance to experience in a school setting.