A Chance to Create Katrina Barnett

Explain your decision to pursue your particular major.

When I was five I wanted to do everything- dance ballet, sing like Amy Grant and Pat Benatar rolled into one, run a cat kennel, and make movies. My wise mother, Bev, made sure I had an early appreciation for cultural classics: Audrey Hepburn`s beauty, the complicated plots of movies such as The Thin Man, and Gene Kelly musicals. Watching unusual people do extraordinary things made me see beyond the boundaries of my life and appealed to my emotions. Before I could even grasp that the films I so enjoyed were fictional, not actually lives of erratic singers and witty Cary Grant types, I knew that I had to be a part of something that could make people feel deeply.

As I see it, art is about interpretation, not emulation. Though I think it’s important to be able to imitate something as basic as personality in order to be understood, any work can be disregarded if it merely shows characters and happenings and yet fails to convey anything of value. To me, film is the most exciting of the arts because it speaks to us in more ways than any other. Paintings and songs only express a part of humanity, but movies confront us with all our traits at once. As we watch movies we observe,...