Liberal Arts Filmmakers

At this point in a grueling edit, I feel with every cut as if I've lopped off a finger. In today's ten-hour workday, I trimmed 21 seconds from a time line. Twenty-one seconds. I policed "ums" and "ahs" from 8 to 6, tightening the "A" roll like a strand of cat-gut across a tennis racket. It is painful place to be in the post-production. And yet, I would rather be throwing away gold to sculpt 26 beautiful minutes than gilding dross in the strain to fill a mediocre hour.

Meanwhile, my assistants labored as animators. Rachel populated a map of the hemisphere with trees; Taylor created a cutaway of an active volcano. These tasks required research into geography and geology, respectively. Perhaps student filmmakers think themselves lucky of they avoid classes in those subjects. Yet there we were, in a dim dungeon of editing suites, needing nothing so much as knowledge of the continent's population centers and the upward path of magma.

A string of such moments (in the most recent week of this project alone) affirm the liberal arts as the best preparation for a life of media production. Yes, one could attend any number of technical training institutes to master the discipline's soft- and hardware. But a holistic sense of form's fit with content, a researcher's ability to navigate fact and rhetoric -- these seem to me hallmarks of "big picture thinkers," the skillset that may distinguish artists from craftsmen or technicians.