“CAPITALIZE ON THE MOMENT”
He’s been behind the camera, directed his own films, helped others make theirs, learned real-world techniques of film production from the pros, worked on videos for the College, and last summer he interned with art professors Matt Weedman and Annie Strader in a digital art project.
The life lesson Austin Yeomans ’20 learned from his minor in film and digital media: “Capitalize on the moment.”
“One of the things I enjoy about doing video work is that I’m the guy with the camera—I record and edit moments so that people will have those memories for posterity. I get to capture a moment and suspend it in time.”
With Strader and Weedman he was suspending time—and objects—in ice.
“We’d put these things in water, put them in the freezer over the weekend, then come back and chip away and take pictures of it. We got some amazing images, but ice at room temperature is such a fleeting material, you have to capitalize on the moment that’s there.”
Yeomans learned that seizing the evanescent requires collaboration, critique, and a little help from friends.
“In class we workshop our ideas, and those critiques help you articulate your idea better, figure out why you’re doing it, and how to do it. In this work, you need more than two hands to make most anything worthwhile happen in a reasonable amount of time.”
Another lesson of his work in film and digital media minor applies to almost any discipline, any project. After all the planning, Yeomans says, you still have to be prepared for the unexpected.
“You’ve got to keep going, even if you’re not sure what you’re doing right then; you’ve got to be okay with a little uncertainty and keep discovering. That determination is more important than having everything planned out. You keep at it, always ready to capture the moment.”