Turning over her wrist and pulling up her shirtsleeve, the Steven Spielberg quote “I dream for a living” is tattooed in bold ink.
Michele Hannon, a Temple University senior, described the day when she decided how she would spend her first paycheck and her career. She would use it to purchase a handheld Sony MiniDV camera to make a few small films, and begin to follow her dream.
While in high school, Hannon figured that if she was attending college for film then she should have a production company name to go with her work. “I wrote down a bunch of different names and kind of came up with the name Mirrorwall,” she said. “It was in 2008, by this point I knew I wanted to go to Temple I knew I wanted to do film and knew that I needed to get serious.”
Hannon spent her first two years in Temple trying to learn all she could about film; she was finally able to put it all to good use during her junior year once she had her core group of dedicated people.
A Resident Assistant at Temple’s Peabody Hall, word of Hannon’s Mirrorwall had started to spread to other students within the dormitory thanks to friends who attended prior Mirrorwall Film meetings and would bring interested students along.
“There were six of us who maybe came to our first meeting during my junior year,” Hannon said. “By the end of that school year it was12 or 15 of us who were active members.”
Mirrorwall Films became more of a collaborative group. Each member bringing something different to the table, rather its new ideas of what the budding film company should undertake or a new addition to their growing team.
