This Fall Semester, students from San Jose State University and Cal State Long Beach were set a challenge to script, shoot and edit a 2-minute movie in a week, on their mobile phones, using Adobe Rush to edit, on the theme of BORDERS. These are the results.
Borders impact our daily lives in many ways, through physical, emotional, intellectual or even abstract means. Borders are an emotively charged symbol of our time.
That was the brief we set our students but we stressed there were potential sub-themes they may consider but were not confined to:
- covid-19
- economics
- national borders
- bias
- language
- gender
- nationality
Ultimately, we wanted them to be creative in their interpretation!
Their video could be a narrative, documentary, or experimental film, a PSA or a music video. In addition to the video, they had to include text, stills, podcast or other forms of communicating that would enhance their ideas and experience in an Adobe Spark page.
The main requirements: they could only shoot on their phone and edit using Adobe Rush.
We drove participating students to these tutorials:
To get the process going we asked students to research broadly the subject of borders, plan an outline, write a script and shoot! It was reiterated that they should plan accordingly as they only had one week to complete the entire process. And there was a prize at stake, so they better sharpen their skills!
The Spark Pages
The Showreel
The Individual Movies
The Winners
- 1st: $200 Nick Ybarra
- 2nd: $150 Marc Velayo
- 3rd: $100 Sharanya Kumar
- Nearly there, but not quite: $50 each Sam Richardson, Katalina Garrido, Mia Wicks
Supplementary Materials
In Summary
This was a fantastic project, it was really gratifying to see advertising and design students with no real film experience rising to the challenge and creating pretty strong and personal pieces of work. When we look at these films it's easy to forget that they were shot and edited (mainly) on mobile phones. It is also testament to the power of Adobe Premiere Rush, it's by no means a lightweight consumer-facing product, it's a powerful editing tool that's built on the foundations of Adobe's jewel in the film-making crown, Premiere Pro.