Video Essays 101

Background

A video essay (or film essay) is what it sounds like: an in-depth analysis that allows you to take advantage of image and sound to present an argument or develop a thesis.

Some prototypical example of the video essay might be Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil and Agnes Varda’s 2000 The Gleaners and I—two feature-length films that represent the culmination of careers-long explorations of the form. But there are plenty of more contemporary examples. Raoul Peck’s film I Am Not Your Negro, based on unpublished writings by James Baldwin, was a surprise hit in 2016. And Adam Curtis’s recent documentaries for the BBC, HyperNormalisation and Can’t Get You Out of My Head, are cult hits, using the video essay to present “alternative histories” of our current moment.

Video sharing platforms like Youtube and TikTok have altered the genre in recent years, democratizing the distribution of this work and allowing more creators to find wider audiences. South Korean-born American film director Kogonada, for instance, got his start posting video essays he made on Vimeo; he’s gone onto create essays for the Criterion Collection and direct feature films like After Yang and episodes of the Apple TV show Pachinko.

The recent critically acclaimed HBO show How To With John Wilson shows how much fun you can have with the form:

In the Classroom

A video essay assignment can of course be a useful way to learn about the art and techniques of film editing, which might be valuable to students in numerous careers and contexts. They’re especially suited to subjects or topics where visuals and audio are prominent parts of the learning content.

But it’s not only about technical skills or film studies. It’s also a great way for learning how to:

• Write clearly and concisely
• Engage a broader, non-specialist audience
• Structure an argument or inquiry
• Present evidence through writing, visuals and audio
• Research media and learn about copyright and fair use
• Imagine themselves as creators

What you will learn from making a video essay all depends on what your goals are, and how you structure your learning time to achieve those goals.

Elements of a Video Essay

At their most fundamental, video essays often have an audio track (the scripted essay read aloud as narration) and video track (illustrations of that narration). But you don’t need to limit your imagination to these basic elements of narration and illustration. You can also include:

• On-screen text
  • Key quotes
  • Section headers or notes
  • Citations
• Talking heads
  • From interviews with experts, critics, the subject, etc
  • Yourself – vlogger or news anchor narration, where you see the speaker
• Found footage – video made by someone other than yourself
  • From the primary text(s)
  • From other useful examples
  • Stock footage – contemporary illustrations
  • Archival footage – historical examples
• Found images
  • Photographs
  • Scanned/photographed objects, texts, ephemera
• Illustration
  • Drawings
  • Diagrams
  • Animations
• Screen capture (e.g. a website)
• Soundtrack
  • Music 
  • Ambient sound

You can also, always, record your own video and audio, too, including interviews, reenactments, and landscapes.

Video Essay Examples

Nerdwriter’s What the Truman Show Teaches Us About Politics is a model video essay. Well-written and slickly produced, it focuses on explicating a single text/topic, but brings in other films and historical context. It’s a good place to start when thinking about the form:

But it’s not the only good example out there. This annotated list of video essays offers a few more, showing a good range of what’s possible in the form, each in just a few minutes:

• Accented Cinema, Drive My Car: What is Intertextuality?
  • More academic in its structure and manner. Makes extensive use of text, sections, examples.
• Grace Lee, David Lynch: The Treachery of Language
  • Impactful use of quotation, whether particular written passages or examples from the subject’s filmography. Lovely sound design and animation, too.
• Existentialist Dasein, What is Existentialism?
  • A more bare-bones example, using images (drawings, diagrams, photos) to illustrate abstract philosophical concepts.
• Intelexual Media, JSYK: Environmental Racism
  • History-focused, part vlog and part nightly news.
• Overly Sarcastic Productions, Trope Talk: Realism
  • The video essay as mock presentation, complete with avatar and old school projector.

Storyboarding

A storyboard is another important tool for working on multimedia essay. At its most basic, it’s a way to help you plan the audio and visuals, to make the leap from script to video.

Here’s an example of a template:

You don’t necessarily have to draw out every frame of your essay (though it can be helpful). But placing your script (or outline) alongside visual and auditory elements will help you think through transitions, gather the appropriate materials, and strengthen the rhetoric of your images and sound.

Logging Clips

Often video essays are essentially video collages, which poses a logistical challenge: you’ll need to gather material from a variety of sources. Sometimes, for example, you’ll need to isolate a single scene from a whole feature length film. This can make clip logging a useful intermediate process between storyboarding and video editing. 

Clip logging often consists of two parts. The first part consists of watching films and writing down (logging) timestamps for the parts that you’ll need. Here’s an example log from a project about screen representations of Emily Dickinson:

The second part is to actually make video files of those clips–to trim them from the videos. More advanced video editing platforms like Adobe Premiere make it relatively easy to work with large video files and cut them into discrete clips. If you’re using a simpler platform like WeVideo or iMovie, you might consider using QuickTime or Window Video Editor to trim clips. 

But before you can even start trimming, you’ll need to get video files in a format you can edit (i.e. a digital file), which might require recording or downloading them. This may sound simple, but it can be challenging, both for technical reasons and copyright ones, so make sure to plan ahead.

Some Useful Tools

Depending on goals, timetable, and level of skill, you may end up using a variety of different applications for making your video essay: 

• For Logging Video Clips – simple applications for dealing with larger files
  • QuickTime
  • Window Video Editor
• For Video Editing:
  • WeVideo – cloud-based, with an easier learning curve
  • Adobe Premiere – professional-level editing suite
• For Downloading Youtube Video/Audio:
  • 4K Downloader
• For Recording Narration:
  • WeVideo – you can record right into WeVideo
  • Audacity – if you want more advanced audio editing features
  • Your phone – in a pinch, use your phone and a voice memo app 
• For Being a Talking Head:
  • WeVideo – you can record from a webcam right into WeVideo
  • Zoom – good for recording audio and/or video

Royalty-free Media

Check out the DLA copyright and digital media page for a list of sites where you can learn about digital media rights and find free media to use!

WeVideo also has a large, built-in library of categorized and searchable music and video that you can use for free.

Sharing Your Video

For class projects, Google Drive is our recommendation for sharing video essays, as the platform can house larger files easily, and gives you lots of options for how to control and track who views your essays. 

If you’d like your video essay to be shared with a wider audience and be discoverable by strangers, platforms like Youtube and Vimeo make doing so very easy. Both have a variety of privacy settings for you to explore. 

They also introduce complexities around copyright: if your video essay uses any material that’s copyrighted, it puts your video at risk of being taken down for violations, or being contacted by a content creator (or their lawyer).