Student Profile: Jaclyn Nott
I’m from Minneapolis in Minnesota, only six hours north of Fairfeld, Iowa. I have family who live in various parts of Iowa, but none of them had ever heard of Fairfield. I heard about the DLMA program through a friend who stumbled upon the blog for the scholarship contest, and the cosmos took care of the rest. I completed my BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1999, it had been a while since I was last enrolled in school, but now that it’s nearing the end, I’m really glad my friend sent me that link a year ago this month.
I came to filmmaking in a roundabout sort of way through modern dance. I’d studied many forms of dance for many years before college, so by the time my senior year as an undergrad came around, I was utterly burned out and looking for something else to stir me creatively. I’d always been a writer, though I never took myself seriously until I left college and began to travel and work odd jobs all over the country, meeting people from all walks of life and experiencing life as only a curious person can. My lifelong love of films merged with my writing, which lead to the completion of my first feature length narrative screenplay and the subsequent production and post production of that same feature length film.
This has been an incredibly transformative year for me as not only an artist, but an individual. Throughout my life I’ve struggled with often times crippling anxiety and self doubt, as I’m sure artists of any persuasion can relate. This year I experienced a mysterious and most welcomed shift into a stronger sense of confidence. I hope to sustain this confidence as I prepare to leave the program and make my way into the entertainment world as a “professional.”
As a writer, our week with Dara Marks was my absolute favorite part of the first semester. I wish we’d had a month or more with her instead of just one week. Or be stranded on a deserted island with her; I would be more than okay with that. While I arrived in Fairfield last July with not only a fully developed concept, theme and first rough draft, Dara’s class provided the necessary fine tuning my story needed to stand on its own. Steve Schott has been indispensable during the production phase of our thesis projects. He always had suggestions or advice if we ran into walls. If Steve didn’t have an answer he always figured out a way to find an answer without delay. He has definitely been a positive force for us all these past few, intense months of production.
Since my career goal is to write for television and film, I chose to create a 5 minute proof of concept short film, The Nebula Room. The Nebular Room is a distilled visual example of a larger script I have prepared as a pilot to a television series called Down the Rabbit Hole. In The Nebula Room, a woman explores her fears and anxieties within the stark white walls of an art gallery. By allowing her senses and perceptions to expand and contract like interstellar dust particles, absorbing and emitting light, she recognizes her authentic self and tames her tenuous grasp on sanity from within her own inner nebula all through various art mediums.
Down the Rabbit Hole is a 30 minute episodic dark comedy for television that centers around how no two people can look at a piece of art and perceive the same thing, just as no two people perceive themselves, the world or reality in the same way. Through the exploration of mental illnesses and imbalances, the viewer is left to question their own reality and how that can be funneled into the creation of art, hierarchies within the art world and personal self discovery through conflict and exploration.
My protagonist is a woman whose well ordered and ambitious world becomes unhinged after a near fatal car crash. Diagnosed with 
Alice In Wonderland Syndrome and significant memory loss, she experiences startling shifts in her personality and her perception of distorted space, time and body image, in which she channels into a newfound ability to draw and paint in order to interpret the world and her memories that fly past on her descent Down the Rabbit Hole.
My plan after graduation is to use both The Nebula Room short film and Down the Rabbit Hole screenplay as a means to either selling the series or using them as an example of my work to secure television writing work upon my move to Los Angeles in June. I will be moving to LA with two of my classmates with the DLMA Karen Borger and Melissa Chaconas, and many of our other classmates will eventually follow us out there in the subsequent months, which is really exciting. We’ve all grown really close over these past few months and they’ve begun to feel like family to me. It definitely makes not only a big move, but also the hard work of breaking into the entertainment industry so much richer and supportive.
All photos by Weber Photo: www.codyweberphotography.com
