HAMILTON COLLEGE
A new era on College Hill
Hamilton College is one of America's oldest liberal arts colleges, chartered in 1812 and set on 1,300 acres in Clinton, New York. The college entered a new era in 2024 with the arrival of Steven Tepper, its 21st president in 212 years. Ahead of the college's December 2024 donor dinner, Ruckus was engaged to write, direct and produce the film at the heart of the evening: a cinematic tribute to two centuries of alumni giving.
Archival photographs, held up to the present
Ruckus mined decades of Hamilton's own history, from yearbooks spanning 1964 to 1989 to mid-century campus film, sourcing photographs that could be re-aligned with their locations today. Each photo pull-away reveals the same spot, evolved and bustling with life, an argument no voice-over could make as plainly. In October 2024, the studio team filmed across the 1,300-acre campus in ten-hour production days, from drone passes at sunrise to President Tepper himself on camera.
Delivered end to end in seven months
The four-minute film premiered in December 2024 as the centerpiece of the donor dinner, in the first months of President Tepper's tenure. Mastered in both horizontal and vertical formats with a branded cutdown and finished photography, it now lives on at hamilton.edu, YouTube and across social channels.
