MUHLENBERG COLLEGE
Moving the Mules
Founded in 1848, Muhlenberg College is a private liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania, known for hands-on learning, standout theatre and pre-professional programs, and a campus culture built on a simple promise: here you achieve, here you belong. Its teams take the field as the Mules, in cardinal and grey.
Ruckus Studios has served as a production partner across that world: hype films for the college's athletics giving push, dramatic portrait photography of Mules athletes, and campaign production reaching the college's adult students.
Big school spirit, one production partner
Mule Madness, the college's athletics giving campaign, runs on energy, and it needed film that could turn cardinal pride into participation. Division III athletes train like anyone else in the country, so the college needed imagery that treated them that way: cinematic, intense, big time.
Beyond the undergraduate core, Muhlenberg also serves adult students earning degrees while balancing work and life, and that audience needed its own story, told in its own dedicated production rather than borrowed footage.
Mule Madness and Mulementum
Mule Madness is a high-energy hype film for the campaign that rallies alumni, students, parents, and fans behind every Mules varsity program: fast cuts, real athletes, and cardinal pride, engineered to make people act, not just watch. Mulementum is its companion film, carrying the same disruptive energy into the college's next push.
Alongside the films, Ruckus put Mules athletes under studio light: dramatic, low-key portraiture that gives Division III competitors the same cinematic treatment as the pros, one athlete at a time in cardinal and grey. In 2020, Ruckus also produced a standalone campaign speaking directly to Muhlenberg's adult students, a different tone for a different audience.
The work Ruckus measures hype by
Mule Madness now runs every year, with all of Muhlenberg's varsity programs competing across Cardinal, Grey, and White divisions to fill Scotty Wood Stadium with donors. The 2026 campaign topped its 3,000 donor goal, in its 14th season running.
Muhlenberg returned across scopes into 2021 and invited a new studio production proposal in 2022. The Mules films remain the named example of the hype film category in Ruckus's own video sales playbook, still used to show new clients the craft.
