Photo coutesy of Anisa Williams

Thousands of years from now, it’s quite possible that Jeremy Waterbury’s name will still be on lips of Christian artists throughout the world. The 2009 Compass graduate from Muncie, Indiana, is a testament of blind faith, complete trust in God, and his calling to be a filmmaker.

Shortly before the 2008-2009 classes began, Waterbury and his wife, Andrea, toured Compass Film Academy. They met with faculty and staff and fell in love with the community. Without a doubt, Waterbury wanted to attend.

Sadly, however, it seemed to Waterbury there would be no way to make Compass a reality. After all, he lived in Indiana. He owned a house (in a recession), and he still needed tuition monies.How would he be able find funding in just a little over a month? He returned to Indiana and prayed.

When September 2008 arrived, so did Waterbury. He had enrolled full time in the film program, and he and his wife had agreed to put their house up for sale. She would remain in Indiana until it sold; he would live in a fifth-wheel in Jenison on Compass’s finance director’s property.

In the end, it took six weeks to sell the house. Waterbury lost money on the deal, so he took a job at a local coffee shop working the early shift. Although stress took its toll, Waterbury’s grades and performance were top of the class. He produced the award-winning thesis short 1 New Message, the story of a father’s last call to his family on 9/11 from his office high atop the World Trade Center. To add reality to the story, Waterbury had the office built to the exact specifications of a WTC suite. The film won Best Academic Short at the 2010 Detroit Independent Film Festival.

As internship season began for his graduating class, Waterbury was in desperate need of a higher paying job. He was hesitant to take an unpaid internship because, soon, he’d have to start paying on his school loans. Working ten or more hours per day on-set, for free, wouldn’t solve that problem. After much deliberation, he took an unpaid internship on TicTock Studio’s independent film What’s Wrong with Virginia (written and directed by Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black, Milk). One week later, they hired him, and he was getting paid.

Since then Waterbury’s career has had its share of ups and down as he works to become established. Still, his resume is impressive. He has worked on six feature films and has a spec script for an episode of NBC’s Chuck. He was line producer on the feature film Frontier Boys. Currently, he is working as the Director’s Assistant on 30 Minutes or Less, a $20 MM feature film directed by Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) shooting in Grand Rapids.