Entering Baylor University to study film, Will Loewen had heard all the horror stories — stories of film students who refused to work on one another’s projects because of the nature of the industry, stories of students who would do anything it took to get to the top, and stories of struggling to find genuine friendships in a competitive environment.
But from a young age, Loewen absolutely loved movies — particularly the Harry Potter series — and decided to take the risk and major in film and digital media at Baylor, unsure exactly what he wanted to do with the degree or where it would lead him.
Loewen knew there was a possibility it could be an isolating experience. In reality, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Instead of competition, he found, in his own words, “a family.”
“All majors are super important,” Loewen said. “All majors are super fulfilling and fun. But I have yet to find another major that is as collaborative and as creatively fulfilling as film.”
This July, multiple students from Baylor’s Department of Film and Digital Media had projects featured in the Waco Independent Film Festival — an opportunity Loewen said would not have been possible without the community and mentorship he found in the department.
The festival, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary, has been featured on MovieMaker Magazine’s 2025 Coolest Film Festivals list and its 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee list. It draws filmmakers, directors, actors, and movie lovers from across the nation for screenings and events.
For Loewen, who is currently a graduate student, having his work shown on the big screen among some of the best and brightest in his industry was both terrifying and exhilarating.
“It’s a little scary just because you’ve been working so much on it — like, hundreds of hours,” Loewen said. “… [When] it’s finally on that big screen, you’re like, ‘Oh shoot, this is it. What if people don’t like it? What if the jokes don’t land, and it’s dead silent in the auditorium? I might just scuttle on out of here.’ But it’s really exciting too.”
Charles Featherston was another Baylor graduate student whose work, a music video he directed titled Molly Drove My Car, was selected for the festival. Although he had a film featured in the festival the year before, for Featherston, the feeling of seeing something you created in the theater never gets old.
“Whenever my things play, I kind of detach a little bit to look around and just read the room [to see if] I accomplished what I set out to do,” Featherston said.
But Featherston and Loewen’s film projects were not just products of their own making. They were collaborative efforts, like almost all of the films that come out of the Baylor film department.
“I haven’t seen, in my life, this amount of servitude from people my age. Everyone helps on everyone’s sets,” Loewen said. “Filmmaking is an impossible solo task … But everyone, especially at Baylor, they just come together. No one gets paid … but [we do it] because we all love each other and we all support the art and we support each other.”
“The thing that I love about being in film and the film industry is that it’s a very small world,” Featherston added. “So there’s a lot of people that you work with often, and so you develop some really good friendships in this industry.”
Baylor’s film department has been an independent academic department since 2015. Before 2015, the program operated as a part of Baylor’s communications department. However, when a film and digital media graduate and his father, Matthew and Carl Linder, made a generous donation, the department had the resources it needed to become freestanding.
“Words can’t describe the impact Baylor had on me, and I’m very happy to give back in some way. My hope is for Baylor to one day be known as one of the best film departments in the nation,” Matthew Linder told Baylor in 2015.
He went on to become a producer and investor in the independent film industry.
His gift helped put Baylor on track toward his very hope — that Baylor would become nationally recognized for its film program.
“Baylor is on the rise … We’ve had some crazy films get produced in the past couple of years,” Loewen said. “So now our film department is getting a lot of eyeballs in the industry. Baylor film and digital media is definitely a place to be at this point in time.”
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The Waco Independent Film Festival and Baylor University are closely intertwined. Loewen said part of the reason his film, The Legend of the C-47, was selected for the festival was because of the connections he had at Baylor. However, it was also because he showed his film at Baylor’s annual Black Glasses Film Festival.
Baylor’s student film festival, Black Glasses, dates back to 1999 when film professor Dr. Mary Slaughter began advocating for more opportunities for students to showcase their work. The festival was actually named after Slaughter herself, who was well known for her dark, thick-framed eyewear.
Throughout the years, not only has the quality of the student films shown at the festival increased as technology has become more accessible to student filmmakers — the scale of the festival itself has grown.
While Black Glasses used to be a private event limited primarily to film students and their friends, hosted on campus at Baylor, a partnership between Baylor and the Waco Hippodrome Theater made the festival’s expansion possible. Now hosted annually in the historic theater on Austin Avenue, the festival is open to the public and draws Baylor students from across majors and departments, as well as members of the Waco community.
For both Loewen and Featherstone, the opportunities they have had at Baylor have been formative not only as filmmakers but also as people. While they are not blind to the competitiveness of the industry, they both hope to continue to work in the world of film and movie-making for the years to come — no matter how that looks.
“If you want to make it in this industry, you need to make sure that you have a practical job, and you want to make sure that you’re good at that job,” Featherstone said. “Because as long as you can pay your bills, you can be as creative as you actually want to be. And as long as you’re able to do all that, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
