(2021) Career Interview: Daniela Cortes

 By: Samuel Hernandez (Casa Romero) 

The following is an interview with Daniela Cortes, a local freelance editor based in Milwaukee.

Can you tell me a bit about your career path and what led you to the role you are in today?

Daniela Cortes: When I was in high school, I liked editing videos but I always just did it for class projects or for fun and I didn’t really know there was a possibility of doing it as a career, so I didn’t end up studying it right away when I went to college. I ended up going to Carroll University in Waukesha for animal behavior, and in my freshman year there, I ended up taking a random class that had a lot to do with Film, and I realized that I was really good at it and I liked doing it so I ended up transferring to Columbia College in Chicago to pursue a Film career and I graduated there in 2016. During my final year at Columbia, I did get the opportunity to do an internship with 371 Productions that works here in Milwaukee. They’re a documentary production company that is housed in Downtown Milwaukee. Slowly I got to intern for them, do a lot of projects, do a lot of freelance work , and then I became their in-house editor for a couple of years and I was doing that all the way up until March of this year and I kind of transitioned out a little bit just to have a break and find something with a little bit more stability. 

What were some of your early roles in the Film Industry?

Cortes: I started out doing a lot of assistant work. So a lot of production assistant work and that includes anything from just logging information. If you're working on a certain film and you have like all of these different pieces that go into it like audio clips and video files all of that needs to be logged and organized, so I started just kind of doing that assistant type of work. I did a lot of transcribing, did a lot of translating too, and then slowly like the roles moved into bigger things like assistant editing, doing some sound recording work and then finally into even bigger roles like editing.

What attracted you to this career path?

Cortes: I think what attracted me at first was getting that opportunity to do school projects back in high school where I got to edit my own films. It was something that I thought was just really fun. It felt like putting pieces of a puzzle together and figuring out a complicated story and trying to make it make sense into one cohesive story. I think just being interested in finding the story sometimes in complicated situations and being able to share that with people is something that attracted me to film.

What skills do you think are most important for someone interested in a job like yours?

Cortes: I think probably one of the most important skills is problem solving and being able to  juggle multiple roles. That might not be so true when it comes to people who work in narrative or in on-set type of roles who just have one job, but when you work in the documentary field, you have to wear multiple different hats. One day you can be an editor, one day they might need help doing sound so you're going to have to be the boom person, one day they might need an extra PA [Production Assistant], and on the same day you could also be doing multiple different things just because documentary crews are so much smaller. So I think the biggest skill is just knowing how to not only multitask, but also problem solving because scenarios come up all the time that you just have to figure out how to solve and how to make it work.

What do you wish you had known when you were starting out in this career/role?

Cortes: I wish I would have known that personal experience is a lot more important than any schooling that you could get. Not to say that college isn’t important but where you’re going to learn like 70% of your skills is in the field so just taking more opportunities to do hands on work, to take more internship opportunities and just to do things that are going to give you that hands on experience because there’s not much that you can learn in a classroom setting that's going to compare than actually being on the job so just taking more advantages of those opportunities   

What career advice do you have for someone my age who is interested in a career in the arts?

Cortes: I guess it depends on what type of art you’re interested in. If it's specifically looking at film, I think it’s just to find your community in Milwaukee, if you want to stay in Milwaukee. There are art communities out there specifically like if we're talking about film, there is a film community out there but sometimes it is tough to navigate if you are not in those circles. It is not a huge community and you do struggle trying to be a filmmaker in Milwaukee because we don’t have all the resources that a city like Chicago or L.A. or Atlanta has so you do have to make sure you know the right people and just be constantly kind of hustling and constantly finding your people that can help you along the way so that you can make a career out of this in some place like Milwaukee cause it is possible but it's harder than somewhere like L.A. or Atlanta or Chicago. So just knowing that community and trying to be as involved as you can from the beginning so even from an early age, even high school age, even early college age there’s opportunities out there for internships and different programs that are really in the Milwaukee film community.

Interview with Daniela

What does representation in film mean to you?

Cortes: Representation in Film doesn’t only mean like who’s in front of the camera. You see that a lot now-a-days that that’s like a really important conversation in Hollywood about the film industry. There’s always like white faces on screen even if it’s a Latino story or an Egyptian story or an Indigenous story sometimes they find, or they used to they’re doing a better job at it now but a lot of times they will find those white actors and make them play those roles that they have no idea the situation, they didn't grow up in that experience, they don’t know how to relate at all so that's like the first layer of it but the second part is who is telling those stories and who has the ability and authority to tell those stories that's like the next big thing that needs to be shifted. A lot of times we aren't invited to the table, so you see a lot of documentaries about communities of color and the person behind the camera is a white person who is the director, or the producer of the film is a white person and they are not able to tell those stories. And they shouldn't be allowed to tell those stories and that shouldn’t be their story to tell. I think representation needs to go farther from who’s in front of the camera but who’s behind the camera and who are the people who are allowed to tell those stories.

How has it been for you to navigate this space as a woman of color?

Cortes: It has been really hard, I was fortunate to be put in touch with a production company that really values the voices of minorities, specifically women of color. At 371 productions it is 90% women and it’s probably 75%-80% women of color so I was fortunate to get in touch with those people but other than that if you branch out or if i would want to branch out just beyond my own production company, you don’t see that a lot and you don’t see that a lot anywhere and that’s just the reality of the film community anywhere. Anywhere from L.A. to Milwaukee it is really dominated by white males so it is really hard to navigate and break into those circles when it is kind of a boy’s club and it is kind of a white boy’s club but we’re seeing that we have more opportunities now to have our voices heard and just to do projects and have opportunities to do those sort of things.