Penn Fencing
A cinematic feature on the University of Pennsylvania's nationally ranked fencing program. The piece was designed to showcase the sport's intensity and elegance while serving as both a recruitment tool and brand asset for the university. Fencing is one of Penn's premier athletic programs, and the video needed to match that stature.
The challenge was making one of the least televised sports feel cinematic and accessible to a general audience, while still resonating with the fencing community and prospective student-athletes.
I shot the piece using high-speed cameras to capture the explosive speed of the bouts — the lunge, the parry, the touch — in super slow motion. At 240 frames per second, you can see the flex of the blade, the spray of sweat, the micro-expressions of concentration. It transforms fencing from a blur into a dance.
The visual language draws from both sports filmmaking and fashion photography. I used dramatic side-lighting to sculpt the fencers' forms against dark backgrounds, turning athletes into silhouettes. The masks become anonymous, universal — any viewer can project themselves into the scene. When the masks come off, we reveal individual stories, personalities, academic ambitions.
Drone cinematography provided sweeping establishing shots of Penn's campus, grounding the athletic story in the broader university experience. The edit weaves between intimate close-ups of the sport and the iconic architecture of the Ivy League campus, reinforcing that these athletes are students first.
The piece was used extensively in Penn's athletic recruitment pipeline and social media channels. It set a new production standard for how the university presented its non-revenue sports — proving that every program deserves cinematic treatment, not just football and basketball. The fencing coaching staff credited the video with contributing to a record-breaking recruitment cycle.