Rob Adler — Filmmaker · Director

Essay & Documentary Film

Non-Fiction & Scholarly Film

The essay-film as intellectual argument — where the camera does not merely illustrate but thinks. My documentary and scholarly film work treats the moving image as a form of research, not just 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 both USC and DePaul I have taught in the film school and the theatre school — directing students and acting students, often in the same week. The methodology is the same in both rooms: composition as information architecture, constraint-based exercises rooted in ensemble practice, and Walter Murch's emotion-first framework for understanding why the edit serves the actor. I built these curricula from scratch, taking students from visual grammar and screenplay format through shot lists, coverage, and the cutting room — and I bring the same ensemble intelligence to conservatory acting training and film production courses.

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. The course treats composition as information architecture, not aesthetics — eight design principles, six methods for creating cinematic depth, and Freytag's Pyramid applied directly to shot selection and staging decisions.

Signature exercises use radical constraint borrowed from ensemble practice: 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 · Co-Head BFA Acting, Asst. Professor

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. 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

Composition as Information Architecture

The course opens with a premise: a frame is not a picture, it is a hierarchy of meaning. Students learn eight design principles — unity, balance, visual tension, rhythm, proportion, contrast, texture, 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 camera doesn't reward performance — it rewards behavior. My job is to create the conditions in which behavior becomes visible, repeatable, and compositionally precise. The same tools that make a theatre ensemble alive in space make a film scene alive on screen. The discipline changes; the intelligence doesn't."

— Rob Adler · Teaching Philosophy

01 · Fiction & Non-Fiction as One Inquiry

Form Follows Argument

I teach students to ask what form their material demands — not to choose fiction or documentary first and then fill it. The essay film, the hybrid form, the installation: these aren't genres to sample; they're answers to questions about what cinema can do that other media can't.

02 · Directing & Acting for Camera

Live Behavior on Demand

Whether I'm working with trained actors, non-actors, or students learning to direct, the methodology stays constant: Spolin's attention structures, ensemble games, and compositional awareness create the conditions for genuine behavior rather than performed behavior. The camera finds what is real. And when I teach editing, I teach Murch's hierarchy — emotion at 51%, spatial logic last — so students understand that every performance choice is also an editorial argument.

03 · Research as Creative Practice

Archive and Improvisation Together

My devised theatre work — Patriot Act, Exagoge, Bad Hamlet — was always research-led. I bring the same methodology to film: deep archival and contextual investigation as the engine of devising. Students learn that rigorous research produces more surprising images, not safer ones.

04 · Industrial Craft & Intellectual Inquiry

Both, Always

Craft without inquiry produces competent work. Inquiry without craft produces unfinished ideas. I build courses that demand both: students should be able to articulate why a shot works and then make it. The conservatory model at its best never separates these.

"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