Noah Vaknin

Film & Media Arts – Bachelor of Fine Arts

Current Semester: Spring 2023

Graduation: Fall 2024

As a young kid, I was always quite active and was pushed to be a runner by my family. I was always put in this little box or asked “do you still run?”, but after a while, I realized my passion for running was incredibly lacking. It took one year, specifically my sophomore year of high school, to decide what my real passion was and what my creative side craved: filmmaking. High school came and went, leading to my study at the University of Tampa, which has lead me through several roads and an increased enrichment of my film knowledge. I began my journey here completely locked into the idea I was going to purely be a film director, but through my courses and time here, I began to find a new love in the world of filmmaking: scriptwriting. Classes such as World Cinema helped broaden my film taste to accept more exotic ideas and embrace complex themes and my screenwriting classes with Cynthia Savaglio helped invigorate a true passion for screenwriting, granting a deeper understanding of film vocabulary, while tweaking and experimenting. I then proceeded to take Narrative Production with Taylor Curry, where, despite being hampered by extraneous circumstances and adversity, I was able to craft and develop an interesting script idea into my first really expansive film. The final class of Cinematography, with Warren Cockerham, taught me more through exploring and studying different types of equipment, allowing me to have a more refined taste and familiarity with the equipment used to shoot my future films on.

My schooling has enabled me to more easily determine my strengths in my chosen subjects of study, which has showed me that my attitude is something that would be a significant asset to my career. In general, I am a highly comedic person that enjoys expressing my creativity via various ideas that I write down for future development, and my witty approach to life keeps environments light and easygoing, which can also tend to influence my scriptwriting. When it comes to the production process, my strength rests in my unconventionality, since I prefer to explore and push traditional filmmaking boundaries, whether in production or post-production. I am an active director with a clear vision, yet I am adaptable and can make changes to improve my vision while also encouraging feedback from others around me.

With a person’s strengths, one must also analyze their shortcomings; the ones that I currently possess and aim to improve on are present in both my writing and directing styles. As a scriptwriter, my vision of what I’m creating may be uncompromising and overpowering at times, resulting in some unusual pacing within the story and my screenplay looking overly complex. To remedy this issue, I’m working on being less detailed in my screenplays and focusing more on character rather than setting, which will allow my characters to shine more in my works. As a filmmaker, my worst flaw has to be poor time management, which makes me prone to startling errors in post-production and causes me to take on far more work than is really necessary for a particular movie. This is a work in progress since it is a negative habit that has evolved over time, but it is gradually being addressed as a result of me taking more responsibility and being more active in managing my days to truly construct an ordered schedule for myself in future projects.

Once I address these strengths and shortcomings, I will be able to carry out the present plan I have for after graduation. This is to begin with my current objective after graduation, which is pursuing a career in scriptwriting, where I can continue to expand on the various ideas that I can use to help influence and inspire within the industry. I am currently deciding whether to pursue a Masters degree, which could certainly be a boon to networking and future progress in this given industry. I also currently have an internship opportunity to work with a connection in production this summer, which hopefully can be a springboard into following this intense pursuit and love of writing, eventually bringing both sides of the creative process together: writing and directing.