Rustem Tukhbetov

Educational Reels

2024—2026

What would normally take a lecture fits into a minute of vertical video.

Format
Instagram, vertical reels, about a minute each
My part
Directing, filming, edit, subtitles, colour, sound
Made with
Made with a scholar of Eastern studies
Tools
Premiere Pro · CapCut

A series of reels on Turkish history and culture: Seljuk carpets, the wooden columns of an Ankara mosque, a contemporary art show. I work in a pair with a scholar of Eastern studies Polina Liubimova: the expert is responsible for what gets said on camera, everything else is mine — filming, edit, production.

The hard part is density. A subject that would fill a lecture gets one minute of vertical video, and a single thought has to fit into it whole rather than three of them half-way. So the edit here is about rhythm: pauses cut out, the frame changing where the thought turns, subtitles readable at a glance.

Colour, sound and titles are matched from episode to episode, so the series reads as a series even when one reel turns up in a feed by chance. It has been running since 2024 and new episodes are still coming out.

← All work