Comments on: Videographic Criticism 101

By: Melanie Kohnen

Melanie Kohnen — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 17:46:57 +0000

I agree that the video essay has great potential for teaching as well. We didn’t really talk about the video essay as a teaching tool so much, but we did think about how to teach the video essay or how to include some of the technical exercises to get students to think about film differently.

Yes, definitely. I certainly think that the genre of the video essay can learn a lot from fan videos about framing arguments through editing decisions alone, without having to rely on on-screen text or voice-over. The use of pop music in many vids seems to be a point of hesitation for some scholars, so that’s something to talk about in more depth.

There’s a conversation going on about proposing a workshop on our experience for next year’s SCMS conference, and if that happens, putting together a repository seems like a great idea. In the meantime, looking through participants’ Vimeo channels is probably the best alternative.

By: Melanie Kohnen

Melanie Kohnen — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 17:39:15 +0000

Thank you! What’s the workshop that you are participating in? I’d love to hear more about it.

By: Melanie Kohnen

Melanie Kohnen — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 17:27:38 +0000

Thank you so much for sharing your vid–it is fantastic and exactly what I was talking about! It uses the language of vidding so well to make its point, including the song. I got the feeling during our workshop that using a pop song comes too close to the music video for some scholars, implying that a music video is not/cannot be scholarship. I don’t agree with that. I think that the voice-over is (or seems to be) a more acceptable framing tool than a pop song in a video essay because it stems from the “serious” genre of the documentary. So there is definitely still room for discussion of why we might consider some formal strategies more “scholarly” than others…

By: Allison McCracken

Allison McCracken — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 18:41:11 +0000

Thanks so much for the summary of what sounds like an amazing workshop. I hope its success will encourage others like it; my students often describe themselves as “visual learners” (sometimes code for “I haven’t done the reading”) and these kinds of video essays offer a potentially very rewarding way of condensing arguments without sacrificing complexity that would otherwise require a great deal of reading (Corey Creekmur’s piece, for example, works well in this regard). I am equally impressed with the pieces that are less straightforward, as they offer students new ways to think about how different kinds of texts talk to each other.

I agree with the author here that fan-made remix video does similar kinds of critical work and I have also utilized remix to great effect in my classes. I hope that more scholarly and institutional investment in the video essay will in turn draw more scholarly attention to the work of remix creators and help to make the cultural and professional hierarchies that often separate these two forms of formal creativity and cultural critique less acute. They have much to say to one another.

Finally, I really appreciate the participants’ willingness to post their exercises online, and it would be wonderful to have an official (SCMS-sponsored?) repository of such video essays available for media scholars to use in our classes. And, of course, more workshops for all!

By: Desi Tashan

Desi Tashan — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 16:16:24 +0000

Looks like you have had a awesome experience during this, soon will be part of workshop like this.

Regards

By: Sumana Harihareswara

Sumana Harihareswara — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 14:40:48 +0000

What a cool workshop! I especially appreciated getting to learn about the exercises that helped y'all learn these skills. And I personally also come more from the fan-made video remix tradition so I applaud your interest in keeping the no-voiceover constraint. For form and content analyses, the video essay is a rich tool, but I still wonder how the video essay can work for Media Industries Studies, for example, which is a field of inquiry dedicated to exploring the production, circulation, and reception of media texts. How can you represent a para-textual analysis in the format of the video essay? I did a bit of this sort of thing in my fanvid "Pipeline", in case that's of interest!