About eighteen months ago Marina Shifrin packed up and moved from New York City to Taiwan to work for Next Media Animation, a company that produces intentionally bizarre CGI animations to go with off-color news reports. The results often go viral, like NMA's portrayal of Tiger Woods' falling out with Elin Nordegren.
For Shifrin, a University of Missouri School of Journalism graduate, the job was in theory a perfect marriage of her two passions -- journalism and comedy. But the relationship officially ended on Friday when she uploaded a video to YouTube with a special message for her bosses.
"I went crazy a little bit," Shifrin told Daily RFT from Taiwan where she was preparing to board a plane back to the U.S. "I snapped, and that was the video."
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Shifrin says although she loved Taiwan, her time abroad has been isolating. She worked a night shift (8 p.m. to 5 a.m.) at NMA, and she doesn't speak Mandarin. Although she says she became friends with her boss, they increasingly fought over how many clicks and views her work received in the nonstop struggle to create viral videos (if you'd like to learn more about the NMA process, Shifrin actually gave an interview about it to Gizmodo about a year ago).
"It was horrible," she says. "I've always used humor to deal with anything that's difficult in my life. In that video you're genuinely seeing me unravel and the end result was...it was just so silly."
That's how she ended up doing this at 4:30 a.m. in her office:
Shifrin says she called her boss' boss before uploading the video to put in her notice, but did not tell anyone but her friends and family about the YouTube clip. She also uploaded a resignation of sorts from all of journalism on her blog (wherein she describes her beloved time at Mizzou):
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