After honing his video skills at TUTV as an undergrad, Jake Rasmussen, TFM ’14, has gone on to build a successful following as a content creator and recently appeared in a Raisin Bran ad in Super Bowl LX.

“I do what I call dumb, wholesome comedy,” said Jake Rasmussen, TFM ’14, on the videos he creates for his YouTube channel with a following of 1.63 million.  
 
The Abington, Pennsylvania, native, who also freelances as a video editor, creates comedy videos rife with puns, parodies and gags for YouTube Shorts, which are also shared on TikTok and Instagram. Recently, he partnered with Raisin Bran to create his own promotional short and appeared in a commercial aired during Super Bowl LX. 
 
The Raisin Bran-sponsored short, titled “taking ‘listening to your gut’ too literally,” stars Rasmussen in the role of himself, his friend, his gut and his brain, all in conversation with each other. It features the breakage of the fourth wall and wordplay that characterizes Rasmussen’s content and keeps his audience snickering. In the commercial, which aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl LX, Rasmussen plays a football tailgater cheering on a table-smashing William Shatner, who extols the support of the fibrous breakfast cereal in maintaining gut health. 
 
Rasmussen’s creative process relies on trusting his instincts and listening to his subconscious. “A lot of my ideas come to me in my sleep,” said Rasmussen. “I'll wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning with a dream of an idea. With one eye open I’ll write the idea down and sometimes I’ll even write a couple lines from the script.” 

Beyond what’s intuitive, Rasmussen’s content is the product of skills he’s been carefully honing since childhood. When he was 9, his short animated film The Human Body went on to win awards in a few national kids’ film festivals and was broadcast nationally on HBO. It doesn’t hurt that he was raised by a filmmaker—his mother LeAnn Erickson is a professor of film and media arts in Temple’s School of Theater, Film and Media Arts.  
 
“She taught me so much at an early age. She was teaching me Final Cut Pro when I was in second grade. She taught me a lot about editing, producing, filming, how to submit to film festivals, how to write a bio,” said Rasmussen.  
 
At Temple, Rasmussen majored in film and media arts and got heavily involved in TUTV. Rasmussen was a co-creator alongside Karl Weimar, TFM ’14, of one of TUTV’s first comedy series, The Grog Show, featuring sketches by Rasmussen’s sketch comedy group, Grog. 
 
He recalls strong relationships with his professors while at Temple. “I loved Chris Cagle from my film analysis class. I remember on my first day of film school, he said, ‘From this day forward, you will never be able to watch a movie without overthinking it or mentioning things to friends and family and bothering them.’ And to this day, that rings true.” 
 
After graduation, Rasmussen moved to New York and got hired as a video editor for Vice Media, mostly editing trailers for its newly created TV channel. For his editing work he won a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Shortform Nonfiction or Reality Series as well as awards in numerous categories at the the PromaxBDA Promotion, Marketing and Design North America Awards and the Clio Entertainment Awards. He also briefly hosted his own show, Jake Loves Movies, while at Vice.  
 
In 2019, Rasmussen became a senior creative at Thrillist before pivoting to freelance work. Since then, he has devoted more time to online content creation, in which all of the editing and filmmaking he’s done in his career has primed him to find success.  
 
“As a video editor, I've been trained to think of video in terms of what’s precise, quick and fast and that lends itself to this short-form space on YouTube where you have to get to the point right away,” said Rasmussen. “You’ve gotta hook your audience and get people to stick around for more than three seconds.”