How I Got Here...
How did YOU get here?
Hi! Before posting my dissertation research, I thought I should introduce myself. (I hope you introduce yourself in the comments!) I started my career as an assistant corporate video producer in Boston, Mass.* Eventually, I worked my way up to editor. That’s where my passion for the craft of editing started.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that editors don’t get the credit they deserve. My boss (the director/producer) would often shoot 10 hours of footage for a 10 or 15-minute video. At the end of every shoot, he’d pass me the videotapes as if he were Michelangelo handing me David himself. In reality, however, it was just a slab of marble.
The marble isn’t the statue, and the recorded footage isn’t the story! A good editor has to cut and chip away to find the best possible story within the enormous amount of footage.
That’s why I studied editing in graduate school at UT-Austin. I was gobsmacked by how much attention directors received and how little credit editors (especially female editors) got. GOBSMACKED I SAY! So… I made it my mission to shine a light on their work and bring them out of the shadows.
So that’s why I’m here. What brought YOU here?
*Fun fact: my friend Candace Tomarken helped me get that first production job. She’s an Executive Producer on the documentary series Pee Wee As Himself, which recently won an Emmy, a Producer’s Guild, and a Peabody for Best Documentary. (Has anyone else seen it?) It’s funny, complicated, and I HIGHLY recommend it.
Hi! I’m Annalise. My background is in strategic communications with a focus on advertising and a minor in psychology, and a lot of my work sits at the intersection of media, design, and audience behavior. I want to go to graduate school but currently just doing research that interests me. my master’s thesis would center around film, but from a different angle, I’m researching how science fiction films shape public understanding of future technologies, space exploration, and humanity’s place in the universe. I’m especially interested in how films like Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and other speculative cinema influence the way people think about scientific progress, communication, and even existential ideas like the Kardashev Scale. I look at film not just as entertainment, but as a form of cultural messaging that can shape perception, aspiration, and public imagination.
Lithuania is one stopt out of three countries, because I'm enrolled on an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master on Impact Entrepreneurship. Each semester develops in a different university, and ISM in Lithuania is the second one.
As these are business schools, I'm getting to study the business side of independent cinema. However, I don't want to lose contact with other perspectives of cinema, which makes your work very interesting for me.