Behind the scenes of India’s Gen Z media organization Yuvaa, recipients of the Adobe Film & TV Fund

Earlier this year, we announced the first-ever Adobe Film & TV Fund across the Americas and India to support creators and filmmakers from diverse backgrounds. As part of this initiative, we are collaborating with a cohort of global organizations that share our commitment to empowering underrepresented communities.

We’re putting the spotlight on one of the announced organizations in the inaugural Adobe Film & TV Fund and find out how they use Adobe Premiere Pro and its surrounding video ecosystem for very effective storytelling.

Amplifying the voices of underrepresented communities

Yuvaa is a Mumbai-based media, data insights, and community engagement agency, which creates socially conscious short and long-form content for young people in India. They cover a wide range of topics that are typically taboo in India, such as mental health, gender equality, women’s rights, sex and body positivity, LGBTQ+ inclusivity, as well as climate change.

Yuvaa works with organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, Tinder, and Spotify, and have produced multiple award-winning short films, chat shows, and podcasts, as well as thousands of pieces of video content that they share on social media. Around 15 to 20 videos produced by Yuvaa are released every single day.

We sat down with Nirbhay Kumar, executive producer, Yuvaa Originals — Rajat Desai, senior video editor at Yuvaa — Sajal Kumar, content development lead at Yuvaa — and Maanvi, editor-in-chief at Yuvaa.

What does your video editing workflow look like?

Nirbhay: Our in-house team is very small and consists of just four editors. For a lot of projects, we hire external experts. An efficient video editing process is therefore crucial for us to be able to tell our stories and share them on multiple platforms. This is why Adobe’s Creative Cloud ecosystem, alongside various integrated third-party solutions that all tie together to create a seamless workflow, is so helpful.

Rajat: Premiere Pro is our go-to software for video editing because it’s super easy to use and collaborate with. All of the editors we work with are fluent in Premiere Pro, it connects us to many additional integrated tools as well. For example, if I want to change the graphics, I can go to Adobe After Effects, and the changes show in my Premiere Pro project.

On the set of Yuvaa original Be a Man, Yaar! (a chat show on positive masculinity) with renowned actor Naseeruddin Shah (left) and Yuvaa founder Nikhil Taneja.

What are the top tools from Premiere Pro and its extended ecosystem that you find yourself using the most?

Rajat: I especially like that you can create and edit multi-camera sequences in Premiere Pro and that there are various AI-features in Premiere Pro that speed up your workflow. For example, I can automatically detect original cut points in a video and generate captions with Speech-to-Text.

In terms of plugins, we use the Envato extension for Premiere Pro, which gives us access to premium stock imagery, music, and sound effects without having to leave Premiere Pro. Our review and approval process is then done in Frame.io, which directly integrates with Premiere Pro for fast collaboration in real time.

I also like using Adobe Media Encoder to directly import the footage and, if necessary, convert it from the project timeline, which saves a lot of time.

Yuvaa's social impact work: the team visited 150+ colleges across 75+ campuses and met over 10,000 young people to listen, learn, and embrace the voices of the youth of India.

What are you planning to do as part of your engagement with the Adobe Film & TV Fund?

Nikhil: Since our inception, Yuvaa has been amplifying the voices of young talent from underrepresented communities, in front and behind the screen, through both fiction and non-fiction, as well as short- and long-form content. We've created multiple award-winning short films, chat shows and podcasts, as well as thousands of pieces of video content on social media, in an effort to live up to our motto: to make important things interesting for impact.

With this fund, we are looking to scale our impact with long-form storytelling, so we can, at once, collaborate with an eclectic mix of talent and creatives from diverse backgrounds, and work towards telling a story that deeply matters to us as individuals, and us as a society.

Adobe’s video ecosystem shapes the next generation of diverse filmmakers and storytellers

The way Yuvaa uses Premiere Pro demonstrates that the Adobe video ecosystem empowers our end customers, wherever they’re based. Our global network of 400+ partners enables us to democratize creativity and give filmmakers full creative control to tell their story, how they want to tell it.

By collaborating closely with our partners we’re able to jointly improve the video-making process and accelerate the workflow from creative idea, through development and production, to post-production. As a result, Premiere Pro — already packed with hundreds of tools — is becoming faster, more reliable, and more powerful all the time. Many more innovations, especially around generative AI, are in the pipeline that will reimagine video creation and production workflows.

It’s truly inspiring to see how Premiere Pro and its surrounding video ecosystem is used to create such high-quality, engaging content and put the limelight on India. We can’t wait to hear more stories on how our seamless end-to-end video editing workflow is making an impact on teams in areas around the world, where we can help uniquely drive change for the better.