Before stepping into the director’s chair, Victoria Wilcox recalls working in the lighting department for student films in her freshman year. Though she wasn’t at the forefront of these artistic endeavors, she was constantly absorbing the creativity and artistic drive of those around her.
Witnessing her peers fulfill their creative desires sparked something within her to finally step into the spotlight and fulfill her dream of telling stories through film.
“I got sick of just sitting around and letting my anxiety eat at me, because I realized everything that I want to do is possible,” said Wilcox, a senior film and media arts major. “It might take a lot of work, but I’m not asking to go to the moon. I’m asking to share stories of people who are literally around me in North Philadelphia.”
Wilcox founded the production company Torian Studios in 2020 to explore her love of photography and film directing. With the less burdensome workload after graduation, Wilcox intends to grow the business to produce commercials for local businesses. She’s most excited to step into the world of documentary filmmaking — a natural extension of her affinity for human storytelling.
“When it came to COVID [I thought I needed] some structure in my life,” Wilcox said. “Like everything in the world is kind of crazy. Let me go to college. What is something that’s been in my life for all this time? It’s always been storytelling.”
Since childhood, Wilcox has always been attuned to the narratives of human life. She remembers her adolescent fascination with dolls and the stories she imagined and created for them. When it came time for college applications, Wilcox was at a loss for how to plan her future because committing to a university felt like a daunting task.
While deep in contemplation of how she wanted to proceed in her education, she remembered Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther.” The director’s surgical attention to detail in developing the film’s antagonist began to represent the transformative power of filmmaking and inspired Wilcox to dedicate her career to the cinematic arts.
As a Black woman, Wilcox’s natural drive to tell human stories extended to her exploring narratives she felt her culture could relate to. Her coursework and exploration of Black life stuck out to her professors, as her depictions often had a refreshing perspective and depth of emotion.
Micah Magee was one of Wilcox’s professors during her junior year. She was struck specifically by Wilcox’s ability to portray both the struggles of her Black characters and the beauty of their everyday lives.
After seeing Wilcox’s work, Magee nominated her for The National Princess Grace Foundation Scholarship Awards and awarded her the Deglin Scholarship, both of which celebrate student achievements in filmmaking.
“She was willing to take a stand and negotiate the constraints of the project parameters in order to use her voice the way she wanted and to tell the story that she felt needed to be told, which wasn’t a single person story,” Magee said. “It was a story of a collective.”
Her cinematic achievements at Temple came to a peak after the screening of her senior thesis, “The Village It Took,” which took home four awards at Temple’s BFA Film Showcase earlier this month. The accolades she received include best directing, best cinematography, best producing and best lighting.
Before instructing her course for the senior thesis, Neal Dhand was Wilcox’s professor for two other courses between her sophomore and senior year. Despite the success of her most recent project, Dhand still recalls feeling blown away by one of the first pieces she made in a collaborative project when she first enrolled in his filmmaking class.
“That’s a really nice feeling when you can see a young filmmaker who [puts] themselves into the work,” Dhand said. “That was an early time. I didn’t know Victoria nearly as well as I know her now, but I think I felt then, ‘Here’s a filmmaker who’s got a style and something to say.’”
Though she’s sharpened her craft and artistic vision at Temple, Wilcox is eager to take her artistic talents to the next level. She wants to focus on finding a blend of her two passions of directing commercials and documentaries to best accomplish her goals of uplifting voices and aiding her community.
“I do think that there is a space for documentary within commercials, like it doesn’t have to be this spectrum, there can be a mix of it,” Wilcox said. “So I’m really just excited to have more space just to be a student of life.”
link