Martin Krafft 12C

Rachel gripped my hand tightly as the ambulance rattled its way to the hospital. Her eyes were clutched shut in pain. I had started making a documentary about Rachel a year ago, now I was here, holding her hand on the way to the hospital. This isn't how documentaries are made, is it?

I didn't start making films during my time at Emory, but I did learn about character development. In Professor Joseph Skibell's Creative Writing class, I learned how characters have a dramatic arc, a desire, and an obstacle to reaching that desire. Rachel had plenty of desire, but even more obstacles. She desired most of all to live, but she had terminal cancer. It was Rachel's desire to live that made me ask to start filming her, after I had met her in a hiking group in Montana. This was years after Emory, years after my writing classes, and a studio art graduate degree at that point. There wasn't anything school could have done to prepare for the difficulty of accompanying someone as they face a terminal illness, but I had learned about storytelling, and I knew that telling Rachel's story would be one of the most important challenges of my life. I felt well-equipped to approach her life with curiosity and empathy, skills that were nurtured by my time in the writing program. You can find the story of Rachel's life, "Ain't Got Time to Die," on the Eventive platform.

The Woodruff scholarship allowed me to make it through college without having to take on a lot of debt, which allowed me to pursue more creative opportunities after graduation. If I had had a lot of debt, I probably wouldn't have been able to start making films, and I wouldn't have been able to tell Rachel's story.

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