Film student shines at WCC

Caleb Henderson

Editor

Not many teenagers would say they really like the mornings, and even fewer can say they’re a community college teaching assistant. 

For Sarah Burgess however, waking up at 7 a.m. and coming to class 30 minutes early is just another day in the life of a class technician at WCC – a position she’s held since fall of 2023, and was nominated for at just the age of 18. 

“Her maturity level, her confidence level with with all the applications that we use, and her patience – she’s always been a straight A student, she’s brilliant,” said Matt Zacharias, a professor of four classes in WCC’s Digital Media Arts department when asked about why he recommended Burgess for the position of being his teaching assistant. 

Burgess has had a passion for video/multimedia arts since she was a kid, one which evolved into a potential desired career path for her in the future.

“It started out as a kid making home videos with my brother,” she said. “Then in high school when I took the video news production class—-[I] was able to really find my footing there, and known that video was what I wanted to do since ninth grade.”

While she has her sights set on potentially becoming an editor or an animator someday, Burgess has also dabbled in acting on the side as well – something she’s done since middle school. 

Editing is her main focus though, something Burgess describes as “beautiful” and “a dream of hers.”

“You can take an unassorted amount of clips and put them together and make a story, and finding that story through the editing process is something that I really love to do,” she said. 

While only 3.1% of the population in the United States workforce are film and video editors according to the US Bureau of labor statistics in data from a 2022 study, Burgess has shown the potential required to succeed in such an exclusive field. 

Being a former MIPA award winning videographer and finishing second place in the Michigan Student Broadcast Awards last year, credentials like those at such a young age help her stand out amongst her peers. 

Burgess has also gone out of her way to step outside her comfort zone and challenge herself – once completing an entire short film in 48 hours with a group of classmates in WCC’s digital arts program during last summer’s “48 Hour Film Project” festival in Detroit. 

Competing against many other established film companies, the bunch wrote, shot, filmed, and edited an entire short film in less than two days; with the experience going so well they plan to repeat it this summer and also spin-off into their own business venture within the coming months. 

Burgess also posts her own personal and class work on Instagram under the username @sarahjoburgess, animations from fruits to lyric videos featured on the page.

However, her devotion for creativity doesn’t stop there.

Being an avid reader, she read four books in the first month of the new year alone despite her busy schedule, and devotes time to video games as one of her main hobbies – her favorite game to play being “Dungeons and Dragons” where she builds worlds and plans things out in the fictional universe for her friends to participate in.

“It’s a good escape sometimes,” Burgess said. “I like being the author of the world and seeing how other people act in it.”

Currently being on track to graduate from WCC in the fall semester of this year – the world is Sarah Burgess’ map, and we’re just living in it.

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