Has the video essay become a victim of its own success? These digitally produced, critical (or at times, not-so-critical) reworkings of film and media continue to proliferate at a rate beyond what anyone can possibly keep up with. Their ubiquity marks them as a sure sign of film culture’s passage into the era of digital and social media. As an open-source method to express our media-based experiences to ourselves and others, the video essay can be seen as a powerful means by which a generation of digital natives makes sense of its contemporary condition of audiovisual over-saturation. At its best, the video essay provides a compass to navigate an ever-expanding ocean of media.
But with so many video essays being produced, we now seem to be engulfed in an ocean of compasses, as the form expands across multiple contexts. On online platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, movie fans use them to express their passion and expertise amongst peers. In film studies classrooms around the world, teachers not only use video essays as a teaching tool, but also have students make their own videos, demonstrating their ability to analyse media through media making. Video essays find their way into academic journals as supplements to (or substitutes for) text-based scholarship. They are screened in film festivals as introductions to films, or as standalone works of art. (Obversely, they’re also increasingly an object of commodification. 2017 saw more explicit attempts to harness, and thus rein in, the power of the form to serve the interest of commercial websites, from movie streaming start-ups to venerable film criticism sites. In this regard, the video essay has become a mirror of the movies it studies, prone to product placement, overzealous formatting and sequelisation.)
As video essays make their way through different venues, the same holds for video essay makers Education is commonly divided formally into such stages as preschool or kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and then college, university, or apprenticeship.A right to education has been recognized by some governments and the United Nations.
But with so many video essays being produced, we now seem to be engulfed in an ocean of compasses, as the form expands across multiple contexts. On online platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, movie fans use them to express their passion and expertise amongst peers. In film studies classrooms around the world, teachers not only use video essays as a teaching tool, but also have students make their own videos, demonstrating their ability to analyse media through media making. Video essays find their way into academic journals as supplements to (or substitutes for) text-based scholarship. They are screened in film festivals as introductions to films, or as standalone works of art. (Obversely, they’re also increasingly an object of commodification. 2017 saw more explicit attempts to harness, and thus rein in, the power of the form to serve the interest of commercial websites, from movie streaming start-ups to venerable film criticism sites. In this regard, the video essay has become a mirror of the movies it studies, prone to product placement, overzealous formatting and sequelisation.)
As video essays make their way through different venues, the same holds for video essay makers Education is commonly divided formally into such stages as preschool or kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and then college, university, or apprenticeship.A right to education has been recognized by some governments and the United Nations.
