Rob Adler — Filmmaker · Director

Essay & Documentary Film

Non-Fiction & Scholarly Film

The camera can do more than illustrate an argument; it can make one. My documentary and scholarly films use image, sound, performance, and editing as part of the thinking—not simply as documentation.

2025 · Essay Documentary · Director

The Alchemy
of Space

Viola Spolin & the Conjuring of the Invisible

A scholarly short documentary arguing for Viola Spolin's space work as theatrical invocation rather than illustration — placing her contribution alongside Peter Brook, Grotowski, and Japanese Nō theater. This is film as peer-reviewed argument: produced by Theatre Journal / Johns Hopkins University Press, presented at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). The essay-film form was chosen deliberately — because the argument needed cinema, not prose, to work.

Theatre Journal · JHUP ATHE Presentation 2025 Essay Film Scholarly Documentary Peer-Reviewed

2020 · Theatre on Film · Producer

Otto Frank

Roger Guenveur Smith

Watch ↗

Teaching Practice

Teaching Across Film & Theatre

At USC and DePaul, I have taught in film schools and drama schools—directors and actors, often in the same week. I built courses that make professional filmmaking concrete: visual grammar, screenplays, shot lists, coverage, camera movement, and the cutting room. The same question runs through both rooms: what does the story require, and how do we give artists precise tools without getting in the way of discovery?

2014–2017 · Full-Time Lecturer

School of Cinematic Arts & School of Dramatic Arts
University of Southern California

Created an MFA On-Camera Curriculum from scratch and built the first dedicated MFA Filmmaking for Actors course — taking students through the full production pipeline: visual grammar, screenplay format, shot types, camera movement, coverage, storyboarding, shot listing, and editing principles. Rather than treating composition as decoration, the course teaches actors and directors how framing, depth, movement, and editing communicate story and shape performance.

Signature exercises use strict constraints: a 30-second film — black and white, no cuts, no camera movement, no sound — to tell a complete story. The limitations function like a Spolin exercise: they locate creativity rather than restrict it. Also developed a BA Minor in Comedy incorporating stand-up, magic, and improv.

MFA Filmmaking for Actors (created) MFA On-Camera (created) BFA On-Camera (created) BA Comedy Minor (created) MFA Improvisation MFA 1st Year Production

2017–Present · Assistant Professor of Acting

The Theatre School & School of Cinematic Arts
DePaul University

Created an integrated Acting for the Camera Sequence and continued developing the MFA Filmmaking for Actors course — curriculum that trains actors to understand the camera as a collaborator rather than a constraint. Students learn Walter Murch's hierarchy of editorial priorities (emotion at 51%, spatial logic last) not as film history but as a working argument: the actor's choices are the edit's raw material. From 2023–2026, I served as Co-Head of BFA Acting in the first co-leadership arrangement in the school's history.

Recipient of the Wicklander Fellowship for Professional Ethics (2024–25) and the Excellence in Teaching Award (2021). My research into acting pedagogy has been published in Theatre Topics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).

BFA On-Camera Skills MFA Filmmaking for Actors MFA Advanced Acting for Camera BFA Acting (all years) MFA Improvisation BFA Directing: Intro to Performance

      
      Filmmaking for Actors — Course in Practice
    

Framework · Visual Language

Every Frame Tells the Story

The course begins with a practical premise: every visual choice tells the audience what matters. Students learn eight design principles—unity, balance, visual tension, rhythm, proportion, contrast, texture, and directionality—and six methods for creating depth in a two-dimensional field, from chiaroscuro to atmospheric perspective. This vocabulary is grounded in art history (Brunelleschi, Caravaggio) and tested immediately in shot analysis.

Exercise · Constraint & Structure

Freytag's Pyramid Meets the Shot List

Students apply Freytag's dramatic structure directly to shot selection and staging — mapping inciting incident, rising action, and climax onto specific visual choices in films like Rear Window. The 30-second constrained film (no cuts, no camera movement, no sound, no color) follows: a Spolin-style limitation that forces mise-en-scène to carry the full weight of narrative. The follow-up assignment — a 60-second screenplay, exactly six shots, no audible dialogue — builds the same discipline into writing.

Framework · Editing Theory

Murch's Hierarchy, Actor-First

The editing unit teaches Walter Murch's six priorities — emotion (51%), story, rhythm, eye trace, 2D placement, 3D spatial logic (4%) — with Murch's own instruction: sacrifice upward from the bottom. For actors, this reframes everything: the editor's first question is always what did the actor feel? The course covers hard cuts, J and L cuts, cutaways, crosscutting, and the 180° rule, alongside coverage, shot listing, and the lined script.

Teaching Philosophy

How I Teach Film

"The work has to serve the script, director, camera, and editor with precision, yet it cannot look manufactured. I teach craft so actors and filmmakers can meet those demands—and still remain alive to the moment."

— Rob Adler · Teaching Philosophy

01 · Fiction, Documentary & Hybrid Forms

Choose the Form the Work Needs

I ask students to begin with the material. Does it need fiction, documentary, essay, or a hybrid? Form is not a category to fill; it is a practical and creative choice about how the audience will experience the story.

02 · Directing & Acting for Camera

Precision Without Manufactured Results

Whether I am directing actors or teaching directors, we work with concrete tasks, marks, eyelines, frames, and points of concentration. The goal is exact work that still contains real thought, listening, and discovery. In the edit, I teach emotion first—because every technical choice must serve the performance and story.

03 · Research as Creative Practice

Research Feeds Imagination

My devised theatre work—Patriot Act, Exagoge, and Bad Hamlet—began in research and came alive through play. I bring that pattern to film: investigate deeply, then let the material surprise you.

04 · Know How & Know Why

Skill and Purpose

Students should be able to explain why a shot works and then make it. Ideas without craft stay abstract; craft without a point is empty. I build courses that demand both.

"Rob's gifted commitment as scholar and practitioner is essential to the American Theatre now and for generations to come."
— Roger Guenveur Smith, Actor, Writer, Director

Rob
Adler

Fiction Films

Non-Fiction & Scholarly Film

The Alchemy
of Space

Teaching Across Film & Theatre

How I Teach Film

On Screen as Actor

Watch the Work

RobAdler

Fiction Films

Non-Fiction & Scholarly Film

The Alchemyof Space

Teaching Across Film & Theatre

How I Teach Film

On Screen as Actor

Watch the Work

Rob
Adler

The Alchemy
of Space