It was her first morning at the rifle range in basic training, and Dejanae Weathersby had fired a shot.
It was winter at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and trainees were in "full battle rattle." Weathersby’s Kevlar helmet kept sliding down and pushing her glasses off her face, and her thin gloves did nothing against the cold. When she dropped into a prone position, she couldn't see through her sights or feel her fingers. The alarm sounded. She didn't move.
A drill sergeant kicked her boot and demanded to know why she hadn't fired. She told him she couldn't feel her hands. He asked where she was from.
"Las Vegas, drill sergeant," she answered.
Hearing she was from Las Vegas, he sent her straight to the van with the heater.
"It's my favorite story to tell," Weathersby said. "He was a real one."
Weathersby, who spent eight years in the Army National Guard, is now pursuing a master's degree in media innovation at the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø's Reynolds School of Journalism as part of the 2028 cohort. This Veterans Day, she reflects on how service, years in the classroom and a childhood spent watching movies led her to filmmaking.
A VHS tape and a spark
Born in Southern California, Weathersby grew up in Las Vegas, where there wasn't much for a kid to do, especially when summer temperatures hit triple digits. She stayed inside reading, sketching and watching movies, and invented games with her cousins.
"I was the one who was telling my cousins where to stand, what characters they had to be and how the game was going to end," she said. "I was pretty bossy."
Her aunt, who worked at a resort but dreamed of opening a restaurant, encouraged her to turn those games into plays. "She taught me about passion," Weathersby said.
Then Weathersby found an old VHS tape with a castle, an owl and a train on the cover. It was Harry Potter, and she wanted to know how it was made. How did the owls deliver letters? How did the characters walk through a wall at King's Cross?
"How do you take your imagination and bring it to life on the screen?" she said. "It was a spark that turned into a fire that hasn't stopped burning."
In high school, Weathersby threw herself into theater, serving as president of her school's International Thespian Society chapter her senior year.
'Bullets don't fly without supply'
Weathersby recounts that her family didn't support a career in media, telling her it wasn't "a real job." With no financial help for college, she enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 to help pay tuition. She trained at Fort Jackson and Fort Lee, Virginia, then served as a supply specialist with a battalion unit, drilling monthly and two weeks each summer in Stead, north of Reno, while she worked and attended the University.
She tracked vehicles, uniforms, weapons, food orders and budgets. "If anyone needed anything, I was the specialist for it," she said.
The pressure was intense. Leaders prized what she calls "straight aways": soldiers who ran fast, shot expertly and volunteered for everything. Trying to meet that bar was taxing, she said, and it left her with a perfectionist streak she is still learning to let go of.
"You don't become a great leader by dominating."
It also taught her about leadership.
"You don't become a great leader by dominating," she said. "Filmmaking, like the military, is about working with people who have different specialties, under one mission."
Service shaped the stories she wants to tell, too: stories of resilience, sacrifice and people who are overlooked.
"The military gave me structure, leadership and discipline, and teaching gave me compassion, patience and humility."
"My time in the military didn't automatically make me a better creative," she said, "but it definitely taught me to pay closer attention to the details."
She was honorably discharged as a specialist in 2023.
Patience beneath the surface
During her junior year at the University, unsure about her digital media major, Weathersby took a part-time job in early childhood education to see whether teaching was her calling. She became a lead teacher, working with children facing housing and food insecurity, and later a behavior specialist supporting children from infancy through pre-K and mentoring other teachers.
"A child isn't throwing a fit at lunch just because they can," she said. "They probably didn't have a meal for the last two days, and they are still hungry."
"I think the military gave me structure, leadership and discipline, and teaching gave me compassion, patience and humility," she said.
After earning her bachelor's degree in digital media in December 2020, she spent a year on the pandemic response, helping provide COVID-19 tests to more than 111,000 people in the Reno-Sparks community and more than 7,000 vaccinations. The work earned her the Army Achievement Medal.
Choosing film
Years of caring for others eventually brought on compassion fatigue.
"I remembered the child who loved film," she said. "I was doing myself a disservice if I didn't try."
In 2024, she left her job and used the rest of her GI Bill to return to the University. She has since studied screenwriting, documentary filmmaking and stage management, and worked on feature film sets with actors including Terrence Howard, Ruby Rose and Jeremy Renner.
This year, she earned a second bachelor's degree in journalism with a focus on film and media production, and in April, the Reynolds School named her the Doris Sinofsky Outstanding Electronic Media Student at its annual Savitt Awards Banquet.
She is now developing "Opticks," a short film set in London in 1666, during the Great Plague. It captures a 23-year-old Isaac Newton at the moment his prism experiments reveal that white light is made of all the colors of the rainbow. It is the first in a planned collection of shorts about people discovering something for the first time.
"Don't let fear or comfort keep you from pursuing your passion."
Her goal is to give audiences what movies gave her as a child: an escape, and the chance to watch someone overcome what seemed impossible.
"The kind of work that plants a seed, even if it's only one person," she said.
She has been a beginner more than once, she said, and credits her faith with carrying her through every transition. Her advice for anyone weighing a leap of their own is simple.
"Don't let fear or comfort keep you from pursuing your passion," she said. "Be brave and take the step forward."
