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Vincent Longo

Doctoral Student Screen Arts and Culture

Vincent Longo, has been a GSI and undergraduate research mentor for two years. He is the recipient of both the Outstanding Research Mentor Award (UROP 2017) and the Outstanding GSI Award (Rackham 2018). His research focuses on the historical and aesthetic relationships between American theater and film during the mid-twentieth century and he holds a certificate in film directing from the Motion Picture Institute of Michigan.

Mr. Longo assists Professor Matthew Solomon with SAC 236, The Art of Film, a large introductory course for non-SAC majors. He discusses his experiences incorporating audiovisual essays that encompass both media studies and production techniques.

Browse resources for the audiovisual essay assignment and examples of student work. 

Course Details

SAC 236 The Art of Film

Related Learning Objective:

• Master cinema studies critical vocabulary for audiovisual analysis.
• Recognize specific elements of cinematic storytelling and expression.
• Think critically and comparatively about cinematic techniques and representation.
• Construct an audiovisual argument using audiovisual evidence.
• Teach the technical editing and audio-recording skills and audiovisual rhetorical strategies.

Assignment Prompt/Description:

Motif Assignment: In second of the course’s three major assignments, the students make an argument about the narrative, emotional, intellectual, and/or psychological effects created as a result of a motif within a film of your choice on the class screening list. They must use a clip of every instances of the motif in the film, no matter if there are three examples or two-hundred three. In an effort to decenter students’ reliance on traditional exposition they must make their argument without using narration. Instead, students rely solely on the organization and manipulations of clips and very brief instances of on-screen text.

Final Audiovisual Essay: For the course’s capstone project, the students make an original argument about one of the films screened for class, using any of the skills and rhetorical strategies they have learned in the course. The terms of the assignment are left intentionally general to promote the creative audiovisual presentation of original arguments.

Assignment Rubric:

This rubric was used for all three audiovisual assignments in the course. 

Motif Assignment

Assignment overview:.

You will make an argument about the narrative, emotional, intellectual, and/or psychological effects created as a result of a motif within a film of your choice on the class screening list ( i.e. any film that has been or will be screened in its entirety for SAC 236 this term). The nature of this assignment urges you to make your argument in a creative and potentially unconventional way, while still making an argument. Your audiovisual essay should be made according to following specifications:

Choose a motif that you argue effects the film in a significant way. Motifs can be understood broadly, anything repeated—from the use of long takes to a character raising her/his right hand. You will submit a sentence or two identifying your chosen motif and some indication of the role it plays in the film electronically or in writing to your GSI.

Peer Review of “Script”:

Given the short nature of this “script,” you should only focus on two questions: how might their thesis be stronger, more viable and/or more concise? How could you imagine this argument being made visually, with the way you edit and manipulate the clips together? Make concrete suggestions for examples from the film that the essay could include and audiovisual techniques that could support the analysis (such as graphics, text on screen, split screen, fast- and slow-motion, zoom, and so on.

In the digital video editor of your choice ( e.g. iMovie or Adobe Premiere), collect clips of every example of your chosen motif in the film. Plan to use every example in your audiovisual essay of between 90 seconds and 3 minutes in length. State your argument concisely—preferably in one short sentence near the beginning of your finished audiovisual essay in the form of text or voice-over narration (arguments will often evolve as you examine the clips and create the audiovisual essay, but be sure to consult your GSI with any questions about viable theses. Be original and systematic: choose something you noticed, no matter how seemingly minor, and try to use each and every example of the motif in your essay. Clips can be used in any manner or combination you choose: played sequentially, using a split screen, etc. Organize the clips to strengthen your argument, and manipulate them through editing, cropping, freeze-frames, changes of speed, zooming, annotating, diagramming, etc. to support your argument.

After the initial statement of your argument, do not use any further voice-over narration, but you may use onscreen text as much as you wish to support your argument or annotate the images for emphasis and explanation. Each instance of text can be no longer than seven words, and, generally, the shorter the better. Try to avoid always placing the text at the bottom of the screen like a subtitle. Experiment with how the placement, timing, font, and frequency of text can support your argument.

Use music of your own choosing or repurposed sound from the film to establish a tone that helps your argument, but pay attention to volume. End your audiovisual essay with an epigraph from the film or from a course reading. The epigraph should support or thematically connect with your argument and the motif you chose.

Submit a draft audiovisual assignment #2 through Canvas in the form of a playable .mp4 video file between 90 seconds and 3 minutes in length. The file name should begin with your last name.

Peer-Review of Video Draft:

Students will be assigned peer reviews to complete through Canvas. Follow the peer-review prompts listed on the Canvas peer-review assignment. Full points will be allocated for providing timely and meaningful feedback on the work of other designated students in one’s section.

Submit the final audiovisual assignment #2 through Canvas in the form of a playable .mp4 video file between 90 seconds and 3 minutes in length. The file name should begin with your last name.

Final Audiovisual Essay

Create an audiovisual essay approximately three to five minutes long that makes an argument about one of the audiovisual works that was screened in its entirety for SAC 236 this term. While you may choose to use outside sources if you wish, this is not necessary—and in fact may be counterproductive—for producing a successful audiovisual essay. Indeed, we strongly suggest that you look again at the film/video that you have selected and think critically and creatively about what you see and hear instead of looking online! Avoid all extraneous background information, plot summary, description, and illustrative matter—focus on making an original and persuasive audiovisual argument. Your name and the title of your audiovisual essay (all audiovisual essays must include a title) should appear legibly on a title card at the beginning of the video. A title card at the end of the video should contain full citations for any and all outside sources you used in preparing your audiovisual essay.

The terms of the assignment are left intentionally general to promote the creative audiovisual presentation of original arguments. You are free to choose any clips from the film and manipulate them (edit, crop, freeze-frame, zoom, annotate, diagram, et al. ) in the ways that best support your argument. In order to make an argument, your audiovisual essay will necessarily make use of voiceover narration and/or on-screen text, while employing terms and critical approaches you learned about in this class.

The final audiovisual essay consists of three steps that will each be assessed individually, followed by a film festival to showcase exemplary work. These stages correspond with the standard approach to producing audiovisual media: scriptwriting, visual pre-production, and production.

Compose a written draft of your final audiovisual essay (approximately 500 to 750 words). Your first page—likely your first paragraph, if not your first sentence—must include a clearly stated and well-phrased thesis statement that conveys your argument. Assume that the audience for your audiovisual essay has seen the film or video you are analyzing. The first page should also include a brief outline of three or more specific supporting examples that you will consider in the audiovisual essay that follows. Use terms you have learned in this course to support your argument, which should be partially—if not entirely—based on what we see and hear on screen in your chosen examples. Submit your script to Canvas by the due date. During section, your classmates will use the audiovisual essay rubric to peer review your script and storyboard; you, in turn, will help peer review theirs. Additional comments on your thesis will be provided by your GSI.

Script Peer Review:

Students will be assigned peer reviews to complete through Canvas, following the peer-review prompts listed on the Canvas peer-review assignment. Full points will be allocated for providing timely and meaningful feedback on the work of other designated students in one’s section. Your will receive up to 5 point for a workable rough draft (one able to be appropriately peer-reviewed) and up to 5 points for helpful feedback.

Draft Video:

Submit a draft audiovisual assignment #3 through Canvas in the form of a playable .mp4 video file. The file name should begin with your last name.

Draft Video Peer Review:

Students will be assigned peer reviews to complete through Canvas, following the peer-review prompts listed on the Canvas peer-review assignment. Full points will be allocated for providing timely and meaningful feedback on the work of other designated students in one’s section. You will receive up to 5 points for a workable rough draft (one able to be appropriately peer-reviewed) and up to 5 points for helpful feedback.

Final Audiovisual Essay:

As before, submit a .mp4 file to Canvas. The file should be named according to the following convention: [Last Name]_AVFinalEssay.mp4.

The Art of Film, Film Festival

Six exemplary videos from each GSI’s collective sections, chosen by the GSI, will be chosen for the festival. The winning essays from each section will then be screened in a film festival during the final exam period, where they will be candidates for a series of awards, including the “Best-in-Show,” “Best Editing,” “Best Sound Design,” “Best Use of Text,” “Best Original Argument,” and “Most Enjoyable to Watch.” These awards will be chosen by an audience vote commencing immediately after the screening of the last essay in the program. Awards will be announced immediately following the vote and formally conclude the festival.

Examples of Student Work

Motif Assignment:

https://youtu.be/wd9DMCfwd2w

https://youtu.be/xgliduW5PLs

Final Essay:

https://youtu.be/8HIGbVBaZ2w

https://youtu.be/Rr8wsYGaS98

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Writing with Sound and Vision THE AUDIOVISUAL ESSAY IN THE CLASSROOM

2019, Screen Education

A medium that is revolutionising film criticism and bridging the gap between theory and practice, the audiovisual essay is also increasingly being taken up as a pedagogical tool. Providing an overview of the findings and ideas presented in the November 2018 symposium Not Another Brick in the Wall; Teaching and Researching the Audio Video Essay, Catherine fowler and sean redmond argue that the form offers students opportunities to develop their own voices, analytical skills and creative practices. In this era of constant, relentless testing and assessment .of students, it seems as if there is less free space in the classroom for curiosity and discovery. Attainment standards and benchmarking constantly shape the terrain we work within, while the strictures of the marketplace, such as targets and deliverables, have resulted in the slow rationalisation of pedagogy. National curricula in the school system and learning outcomes at tertiary level are clearly necessary, but an overemphasis on results has built new, datafied walls in front of imaginative learning and teaching. As teachers and educationalists, we feel it is our responsibility to lay siege to these walls, since they constrain what and ho we teach- and what is more, they seem to be restricting how our students think and create....

Related Papers

Media Practice and Education

Sean Redmond

In this special issue our goal is to explore the ways in which the audio-visual essay transforms the relationship between screen theory and creative practice, and creates new learning and teaching encounters for teachers and students to engage with the moving image. By bringing together theory and practice, and teaching and research, the special edition intends to create a dynamic dialogue between them, enriching and extending the ways in which we together can think and make the world anew. As the Journal of Media Practice and Education enters the end of its second decade, the audio-visual essay provides one example of how research and teaching have been ‘joined up’. In the editorial for the first issue of the journal John Adams asserts that, ‘It is in many ways surprising that the rich and diverse culture of practice-based media teaching has yet to give rise to an associated culture of joined-up research’ (2000, 3). The questions that guide this special edition are: What kind of creative practice research does the audio-visual essay offer teachers, artists and scholars? What lessons can be learnt from the history and development of practice-based teaching and research in tertiary and higher education for this emerging form? What new perspectives and models does it present for contesting perceived divisions between those who make and those who think? How may the audio-visual essay liberate our research and pedagogical practices? What research and teaching limitations may the audio-visual essay engender?

This article explores how the video essay can be part of a radical pedagogy in the arts and humanities. Written as a dialogue between a screen studies educationalist and a researcher in contemporary education theory, the article examines the different ways that the video essay can be argued to reframe and resist dominant forms of pedagogy. Drawing on small-scale empirical research with a cohort of third year undergraduates at Deakin University, each of the authors read the data through a specific lens: Sean looks to the ideas and themes of radical pedagogy; and Jo draws upon contemporary assessment research. While the article starts from their different positions, it comes together to recognise their shared belief in learning and assessment that thinks and creates outside the box. KEYWORDS: Video essay, learning, criticality, creativity, radical pedagogy, assessment policy

International Journal of Film and Media Arts Vol. 5 No. 2 (2020): GEECT Special Issue: Mapping Artistic Research in Film

Estrella Sendra

This article seeks to foster reflection on film pedagogy and research, encouraging academics to engage in artistic research and teaching methods. It specifically focuses on the video essay as a teaching and learning method, one that requires the willingness to take risks, but also, that can lead to a transformative experience in a still hierarchical educational system. The increasing openness to video essays in film journals shows an awareness of the way in which artistic research may contribute to decolonise academia. The practice of video essays leads to an inclusive, collaborative and polyphonic research environment, which dismantles the idea of a film canon. It contests the privileged position of the written ‘text’, when this is just understood as the written word. It also contributes to blurring the distance between the status of students and that of researchers. It invites them to assimilate work practices, curating and filmmaking, which sometimes happen simultaneously, curating through filmmaking. This article shares the example of the design of the video essay as a creative assessment method for two film modules in the MA Global Cinemas and the BA Creative Arts at SOAS, University of London. It stresses the importance of connecting research, practice and teaching, that is, the recursive study of film through film. It suggests that through making video essays class members become co-curators of the course, where learning is a multi-directional and collaborative experience.

Glenn D'Cruz

David R Cole , Joff P N Bradley

A Pedagogy of Cinema is the first book to apply Deleuze's concept of cinema to the pedagogic context. Cinema is opened up by this action from the straightforward educative analysis of film, to the systematic unfolding of image. A Pedagogy of Cinema explores what it means to engender cinema-thinking from image. This book does not overlay images from films with an educational approach to them, but looks to the images themselves to produce philosophy. This approach to utilising image in education is wholly new, and has the potential to transform classroom practice with respect to teaching and learning about cinema. The authors have carefully chosen specific examples of images to illustrate such transformational processes, and have fitted them into in depth analysis that is derived from the images. The result is a combination of image and text that advances the field of cinema study for and in education with a philosophical intent. " This outstanding new book asks a vital question for our time. How can we educate effectively in a digitalized, corporatized, Orwellian-surveillance-controlled, globalized world? This question is equally a challenge asked of our ability to think outside of the limiting parameters of the control society, and the forces which daily propel us ever-quicker towards worldwide homogenization. With great lucidity, Cole and Bradley offer us profound hope in Gilles Deleuze's increasingly popular notion of 'cine-thinking'. They explore and explain the potential that this sophisticated idea holds for learning, in an easy going and accessible way, and with a range of fantastic films: from 'Suspiria' and 'Performance' through to 'Under the Skin' and 'Snowpiercer'. This extremely engaging and compelling text is likely to enliven scholars and students everywhere. " – David Martin-Jones, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, UK

Artha - Journal of Social Sciences

Mini Bonjour

This article aims to explore pedagogic spaces in autonomous institutions and the identities they enable. It situates this exploration in the undergraduate General English classrooms and works with the uses of differing printed-literary and audio-visual media. It also attempts to show how both writing as text and film as text have equal value in undergraduate classrooms. Films, it is proposed, can be more than supplementary/ complementary texts to the much more conventional written-printed ones. They can and ought to occupy an equally privileged position in the teaching-learning process because they provide possibilities for critical understanding and engagement inside the classroom space. It is also argued that films have serious academic and learning potential than is often presumed to be. The article employs for its analysis reports of reception of films within a pedagogic space from student-respondents. In the process of the analysis, the article seeks to construe how classrooms ...

The Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier

Ashley Hinck

Jean Bessette

While attention to “affordance” has tended to focus on the forms of production that technologies encourage, this essay shifts emphasis to how different modes and mediums also afford certain kinds of engagement in the process of digital composing. Seeking a fresh pedagogical approach for how writing instructors and students might productively engage difficult issues of “difference” together, I argue that engaging audio archives of non-normative voices in the process of composing digital “audio collage” can afford iterative listening practices. Through a study of students’ listening practices revealed in their audio compositions in a gender-themed composition course, I demonstrate the rewards of this pedagogical approach: an increased potential for “a stance of openness” ( Ratcliffe, 2005, p. 17) to non-neutral texts and gender-critical inquiry, a greater sense of creative freedom and productive uncertainty felt by students, and the occasion to discuss fundamental issues in writing, including the process of coming to invention across a multitude of sources, the responsible appropriation of others’ voices, issues of Fair Use and plagiarism, and the relationship between historical evidence and contemporary claims.

Bridging the Multimodal Gap

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Melissa Schieble

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Explainer: the exciting new genre of the audio-visual film essay

ARC DECRA Research Fellow in Film and Screen Studies, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Julia Vassilieva is receiving ARC funding for a project exploring cinema and the brain.

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

During March, the renowned film scholar Adrian Martin and the film critic Cristina Álvarez López are conducting a series of public workshops and lectures on a new and exciting phenomenon of digital film culture: the audio-visual essay.

Barely ten years old, the audio-visual genre has generated thousands of international works. The growing number of forums for it, such as AUDIOVISUALCY , which contains more than 1,000 essays, demonstrate the scale and diversity of this new genre.

Audio-visual essayists intensively re-edit and recombine images and sounds from preexisting film, TV and digital works.

Coinciding with the rise of YouTube since 2005, the format was first embraced most enthusiastically by film fans, who could pay homage to their favourite works by capturing the thematic preoccupations of a director or the peculiarity of an actor’s performance.

Such analyses and homages might privilege particular scenes, gestures or looks – that kiss between Kim Novak and James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) or the cigarette that Humphrey Bogart lights, again and again, in To Have and To Have Not , The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep .

But the new creative and critical potential of the audio-visual essay was also gradually appreciated by film critics, cinema scholars and educators.

Many universities now offer courses on audio-visual practice. Several online film-studies journals, along with the educational blog Film Studies for Free , publish curated sections dedicated to audio-visual criticism.

Since critical and theoretical writing on cinema developed in the early 20th century, there have been three elements to the standard film studies “toolkit”: plot summary; vivid, descriptions of film style; and static, single-shot illustrations extracted from the film.

Single-frame illustration technique was perfected in the 1970s as a methodology of “frame by frame” analysis. It put together sequences of consecutive frames to “get closer” to nuances of facial expression, degrees of movement or interplay of light and shadow.

The emergence of VHS tapes and, later, of DVD allowed greater access to film material, as well as – in the case of DVD – information in the form of commentaries, featurettes, cuts and out-takes.

But it was only with the development of non-linear, video-editing programs (allowing you to dismantle the original footage, even separating image and sound) that it became possible not only to demonstrate and comment on certain features of the film, but to transform it.

Thus digital technology allowed scholars and critics to engage with screen material in a way that was impossible for the most of the 20th century – by directly working on the film’s moving image and sound.

This has led to the development of an innovative performative practice that generates new types of insight, particularly in relation to the way a film evokes feeling and emotion.

Some audio-visual essays relate to a film-maker’s themes or elements of style, such as visual motifs, recurrent settings, or a specificity of framing.

Adrian Martin and Cristina López’s essay Melville Variations astutely identifies a number of props used by the French director of the “noir” era Jean-Pierre Melville, including guns, phones, fedora hats, white gloves, and black and white tiles. It assembles them into a visual montage accompanied by a soundtrack of the signature tune of Le Samourai by François de Roubaux.

Other audio-visual essays are more theoretically oriented, often combining visual excerpts with textual commentaries. Catherine Grant’s work shows how feminist issues, queer issues or interest in the body and affect can be explored through video-graphic work.

Another audio-visual essayist, working under the name of KOGONADA, demonstrates how film history can be illuminated by illustrating the differences between Italian approaches to film-making after WWII and Hollywood cinema of the classical era.

A third group of audio-visual essays tries to do something entirely different – taking the original footage as a point of departure for a deeply reflective, poetic and creative transformation.

What happens if we trace how Ingmar Bergman treats the motif of female characters looking into mirrors in various films and superimpose on these excerpts a reading of Sylvia Plath’s poem The Mirror? KOGONADA’s Mirrors of Bergman is a profoundly moving work that pays homage simultaneously to both Bergman and Plath.

The proliferation of audio-visual essays has prompted various interest groups to pose some anxious questions.

How are we supposed to understand authorship under these new conditions? What is the relative impact of the original author versus the producer of the audio-visual essay?

What about respect for the original work and its integrity or cohesion, which essayists feel increasingly free to cut and splice, dismantle and recombine?

There are also complex questions about fair use or fair dealing for non-commercial, scholarly and critical purposes and contexts.

The audio-visual essay has also been met with confronting questions within the academy. Is it really a form of film criticism and theorising or is it just a testimony to the fan’s imaginative play – not much different from mash-ups or remixes?

There is still considerable resistance to the genre from a large group of scholars who believe that film analysis should remain what it has been for decades: writing that is grounded in methodologies and infused with theoretical concepts, and only invoking the film material as “evidence”.

Another camp believes that the most productive use of the audio-visual essay format for scholarly purposes is one that combines it with more traditional textual explanation, reflection or commentary.

While these debates will no doubt rage for a while yet, we can be sure of one thing: the rise of the audio-visual essay is now unstoppable.

Its rich and varied artefacts are testimony to the fertility of the encounter between passion for cinema, digital technologies and the tradition of film scholarship within screen studies.

Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López will be giving a public lecture, Hitting the Target: Hou Hsiao-hsien Style , at Monash University on March 15, 5pm to 7pm.

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Audio-Visual Film Essay

• Author By simpsonrp
• Publication date April 7, 2022
• Categories: Uncategorized
• No Comments on Audio-Visual Film Essay

Social & Rhetorical Function

Audio-visual film essays, more commonly known as “film video essays,” are film-criticism videos that edit and combine images and sounds from preexisting media with the goal of generating a deeper understanding of elements of film. Audio-visual film essays achieve this goal by using textual commentary and curated clips or stand-alone curated clips. They use rhetorical tools such as providing evidence (the clips), as well as borrow from long-standing video production techniques. 1

Although audio-visual essays are a large genre with videos ranging from multiple topics, such as videos explaining a political crisis or video essays about novels , the audio-visual film essay is a subset genre that has its own conventions apart from the overarching video essay genre.

Studying film through its subject, style, and story reveals truths of current or past historical circumstances, in turn reflecting societal conventions and issues. This aspect is of great importance to filmmakers who are often encouraged to “break open the form,” as well as members of society looking to understand more not only about film but about the world they experience. Audio-visual essays have become increasingly popular as forms of media become shorter in length , rendering in-depth analyses on a day-to-day basis uncommon.2

Audio-visual film essays take advantage of the media type’s affordances; written essays about film do not allow for the capturing of visual nuances.3 In the audio-visual format, the viewer gathers all relevant information quickly, as opposed to the written essayist that would have to convincingly illustrate each nuance. Audio-visual film essays approach the topic in different styles of execution depending on what best will respond to the rhetorical situation and social function of providing or generating insight.

History & Development

Filmmakers have long been cutting and re-appropriating images from film in order to make a specific argument or point rooted in larger societal themes. One of the first examples of an audio-visual film essay can be dated back to 1936 when Joseph Cornell released Rose Hobart , a surrealist collage with clips cut from East of Borneo (1931) and documentary footage of an eclipse.4 However, the mode of viewing and complicated production separates it from the nature of audio-visual film essays regarded today.

With the advent of technological advances, the audio-visual film essay grew in popularity. Film was not so easily accessible before, leaving many to only experience it live in theaters. According to Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin in the 2014 journal Introduction to the audiovisual essay: A child of two mothers , the creation of VHS tapes in the 1970s made film more accessible to willing commentators. Previously, filmmakers had to scour studio dumpster bins to find thrown-out film. 5 With the ability to pause and play tapes, frame-by-frame analysis was made possible, allowing for the analysis of “nuances of facial expression, degrees of movement, or interplay of light and shadow,” as explained by Julia Vassilieva in the 2016 Explainer: the exciting new genre of the audio-visual film essay .6 Later, the introduction of streaming services, which have further altered the way that people access film and TV, allowed for an even quicker retrieval with its digitization.7

The introduction of widely accessible editing software and video hosting platforms also contributed to the genre’s popularity as more people have the means to produce. While filmmakers previously had to manually splice together film, its digitization also coalesced with the digitization of editing software. Editing software allowed creators to separate clips non-linearly, resulting in the stylistic elements of the video essay today. 8 Additionally, the creation of Youtube in 2005 and Vimeo in 2004 allowed users to post whatever they please on these platforms. 9

The invention of a genre also comes with strides to analyze the theoretical and instrumental practices of such genre, to the extent that some scholars such as Catherine Grant are considering it a new scholarly form of analysis. In 2013, the event Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory International Workshop was hosted in Frankfurt, Germany to discuss the new dimensions that audio-visual essays add to film and academia in general. 10

With the advent of streaming platforms, however, comes the ongoing debate of ownership within the film community, particularly in terms of what defines “fair use,” coinciding with the debate about the academic validity of audio-visual essays.11 There are also discussions regarding whether or not this genre disrespects the original work’s cohesion as more and more essayists continue to splice and refurbish existing work. 12

Substantive & Stylistic Elements

The organizing principle of the audio-visual film essay revolves around the creation and execution of a thesis relating to film theory. Because the audio-visual film essay’s social function is to generate insight, the essayist has to analyze film elements in a way that effectively supports the thesis and its societal insight.

Whether it be the thematic intentions of the director throughout various films or paying heed to certain elements of style in one film, all audio-visual film essays seek to prove an argument about an element(s) of film. Reflecting the social function of the video essay, the theses of audio-visual film essays reflect something about society with its message rooted in a philosophical , political , theoretical , or sociological perspective and conclusion while studying the film’s theory. In its purest form, the thesis is what expands and gives further perspective to the film’s intentions. 

The substantive element audio-visual film essayists rely on while arguing their thesis is strategically refurbishing and splicing pre-existing media related to the topic. While the nature and execution of the media chosen may differ from video to video primarily based on either its omission or use of textual commentary, all media is chosen to further the creator’s argument.

The most commonly known form of video essays, that being those using textual commentary in the form of a voiceover, strategically complement the voiceover with curated clips to further the thesis. The execution and nature of the clips chosen depend on what best responds to the rhetorical situation depending on the video’s thesis. In Nerdwriter1’s The Prestige: Hiding In Plain Sight (2016), the creator uses eccentric-looking scenes of the film to illustrate the point about dynamic visuals that speaks to the thesis’ insight; that humans want to be surprised.13 However, the voiceover is not always simultaneously playing over the chosen clips. In StudioBinder’s Christopher Nolan Directing — A Video Essay on Nolan and Time (2021), the creator includes a video clip of Nolan in an interview, strengthening the creator’s point about how Nolan wants the viewer to consider the pressures of time. 14 The clip chosen may stand alone, but it still serves as evidence that the creator’s thesis is legitimate.

As mentioned, not all audio-visual film essays employ textual commentary. Adrian Martin and Cristina López’s audio-visual film essay The Melville Variations relies solely on refurbished clips to argue their thesis that places focus on the consistent set of props used throughout Jean-Pierre Melville films. 15 Without the verbal expression of the thesis, the strategic placement of clips results in sequences that allow the audience to deduce the topic. The creators prove something by providing inarguable evidence (the chosen clips) but leave it up to the audience to think more deeply. Regardless of the form, all audio-visual film essays edit and splice together pre-existing clips to strengthen their thesis arguments.

Within the substantive element of providing related clips exists the stylistic element of doing so in a “b-roll” manner, borrowing from the discipline being analyzed in every audio-visual film essay. While b-roll in its true definition refers to the footage shot by secondary camera crews, its goal and usage, as explained by the MasterClass staff in 2021, is to “create dramatic tension, further illustrate a point, and keep the audience engaged by providing variation.” 16 B-roll footage in film frequently appear as montages or cutaways. 17 In the case of audio-visual film essays, the clips move quickly and illustrate the essayist’s point. In Like Stories of Old’s Chernobyl – How The World Became A Risk Society (2019), the creators show nine different clips that all illustrate the broader point within that beat over the span of 45 seconds. 18 However, the level of overt voiceover-to-visual relation differs from video to video. In The Take’s American Psycho Ending Explained: What Really Happened? (2016) the creators use a three-second clip of the main character’s crazed face covered in blood when commenting on his psychosis–without the need to explain how the main character is experiencing psychosis. 19 In this case, the b-roll footage is word-by-word related to the voiceover for that section, whereas in the Chernobyl video essay, it relates to the broader themes and adds a low-vibration dramatic tone. Regardless of its nature, all audio-visual film essays utilize the b-roll footage style in order to keep the audience engaged and strengthen their thesis. 

The organizing principle of effectively arguing a thesis through the curation and editing of preexisting audio-visual clips upholds the social function of audio-visual film essays–to generate further insight about various dimensions of society through film analysis. 

• MasterClass staff (26 August 2021). Learn About B-Roll Footage: Definition, and How to Use It in Video Production . MasterClass.  
• Orthwein, Jake (20 August 2017). The Age of the Video Essay . Film School Rejects.
• Vassilieva, Julia (8 March 2016). Explainer: the exciting new genre of the audio-visual film essay . The Conversation . 
• Willis, Holly. Rose Hobart . Library of Congress National Film Preservation Board . 
• López, Cristina Álvarez & Adrian Martin (3 December 2014). Introduction to the audiovisual essay: A child of two mothers. Necsus.
• Bresland, John (2010). On the Origin of the Video Essay. Blackbird Archive.
• Nerdwriter1 (2016). The Prestige: Hiding In Plain Sight. Youtube.
• StudioBinder (2021). Christopher Nolan Directing — A Video Essay on Nolan and Time. Youtube.
• MasterClass staff (26 August 2021). Learn About B-Roll Footage: Definition, and How to Use It in Video Production . MasterClass.
• Like Stories of Old (2019). Chernobyl – How The World Became A Risk Society . Youtube.
• The Take (2016). American Psycho Ending Explained: What Really Happened? . Youtube.

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How to do a Video Essay: What is a Video Essay?

Introducing the Video Essay: Assignment of Now!

• What is a Video Essay?

The term Video Essay is hard to define as it is still evolving from a long cinematic history. From the screen studies perspective, it is a video that analyses specific topics or themes relating to film and television and is relevant as it comments on film in its own language. On a basic level it could be defined as the video equivalent of the written essay.

This guide refers to the video essay from the context of the academic audiovisual essay as a multimodal form that combines written, audio and visual modes to communicate an idea. As a structure, the video essay is thesis-driven, and uses images with text so that the audience can read and interpret the idea or argument in a multimodal way.

In educational settings, the term video essay is used broadly for teacher/student-learner generated video and as a vehicle to transmediate between written-text to digital forms.  Through the video essay form, students are able to achieve learning outcomes in a new way as a multimodal experience while engaging with the subject, task or assessment through expression and creation of self-knowledge.

PHOTO: TWITTER/@GIZMODO. Retrieved from http://www.straitstimes.com/tech/death-of-the-vcr-5-things-to-remember-about-the-iconic-technology

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Edith Cowan University acknowledges and respects the Noongar people, who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which its campuses stand and its programs operate. In particular ECU pays its respects to the Elders, past and present, of the Noongar people, and embrace their culture, wisdom and knowledge.

Performing, Remixing & Re-Imagining Data

The audiovisual essay: a digital methodology for film and media studies.

Scholars researching film and media traditionally publish their work in the same forms as other disciplines in the humanities - notably, books and critical essays. But the democratization of video production technology provides exciting new possibilities for conducting analysis and conveying arguments about moving images by using moving images. The Audiovisual Essay teamed up academics and video-makers to explore different ways in which written film and media research can be transformed, adapted, and developed into video-based ‘audiovisual essays’.

The project took as its starting point the edited volume Indefinite Visions (eds. Beugnet, M., Cameron, A., Fetveit, A., 2017. Edinburgh University Press). Contributors to the book were invited to a two-day public symposium at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in June 2016, where they presented their research and engaged in dialogue with film-makers and moving image artists. A group of contributors then teamed up with film- and video-makers on a series of audiovisual essays that together explored diverse approaches to the theme of ‘indefinite vision’. The resulting nine videos focused on phenomena including blur, flicker, glitch, blackness, slow motion, and night vision.

The project tested a range of collaborative models through which academics without previous experience of video production could explore the video essay’s creative and critical potential, and use it as a means of communicating with large non-academic audiences. These included:

• ‘Hands-on’ collaboration between an academic and video-maker, in which a work was jointly authored by both
• ‘Hands off’ collaboration between an academic and video-maker, in which the two engaged in creative dialogue but the video-maker took overall creative control of the final work
• Indirect engagement in a video essay by an academic, for example through the use of their writing as a source text for the video, or through their contribution of a voice-over track for use in it.

The resulting videos, in turn, will provide the broader film and media studies community with a range of methodological models for how to conduct audiovisual film and media criticism, by demonstrating a range of uses of key creative tools including montage, split-screen, voice-over, and various forms of image manipulation.

Other events that emerged from the project included two nights of screenings of experimental and essayistic videos at Close Up Film Centre, London; a workshop in which video essayists were able to discuss the present and future of the form; and a masterclass at the British Film Institute with video essayist and film-maker Kogonada – the first ever public event at the BFI dedicated to the video essay. The video essays that formed the project’s core research outputs premiered at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in March 2017.

Richard Misek

Links and Resources: Documentation of the Indefinite Visions symposium is available at: www.indefinitevisions.com.

The video essays that emerged from the project will be available on this site and in a special double issue of InTransition: journal of videographic film and moving image studies in June 2017

Introduction to the audiovisual essay: A child of two mothers

by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin

The audiovisual essay is not a strict genre or a delimited form – it is the name for a burgeoning field of inquiry, research, and experimentation within academia and also beyond it; the expression of critical, analytical, and theoretical work using the resources of audiovisuality – images and sounds in montage.

The specific inflection of a chosen name always matters. Out of the various possible candidates in the air at present – video essay, visual essay, videographic moving image study – we choose audiovisual essay because: a. we all need to put an end to the casual ignoring of the decisive role of sound in every form of modern media; b. video (as in electronic videotape) is already an anachronistic term in the digital age and has been for some time; c. essay is a word which, in the spheres of film and media (both their analysis and production), has come to carry the simultaneous connotations of intellectual research and poetic exploration – neither simply a vehicle for instrumental rationalism nor art for art’s sake. [1] It is a word which can create its own problems (see remarks below) but, at present, remains charged and useful as a probe to identify a new energy in creation and critique.

The objection is sometimes heard in public forums: but is any of this really new? From Joseph Cornell’s surrealist collage Rose Hobart (1936) to Jean-Luc Godard’s epic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), filmmakers and artists have long been cutting together appropriated images and sounds in order to make a critical point or pursue their particular politico-philosophical ‘vision’. Celebrated multimedia border-crossers including Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Ken Jacobs, and Harun Farocki have been extending the ruminative, speculative form of the written essay into renewed, audiovisual formats since at least the 1950s. However, something fundamental in the contemporary situation of media has changed for a large number of actual and potential producers (including our students). First, computers offer relatively simple but highly effective technologies of digital production and (particularly relevant for the audiovisual essay) post-production. Second, the raw materials – the images and sounds of pre-existing films, television, and media items – are available to acquire and manipulate via digital channels in a way that is historically unprecedented. For close to a century experimental filmmakers sourced out-of-copyright movie trailers and black market prints and literally scoured the bins and dumpsters of rejected footage in order to re-edit, re-film, and creatively manhandle them. Film/video essayists such as Farocki and Marker invented ingenious schemes in order to access the official streams of imagery made by and for corporations or recorded on security cameras. Godard, alongside hundreds of other artists worldwide in the 1980s, went the VHS or Super-8 route, forensically taping from television broadcasts or reshooting playback off of video monitors.

The audiovisual essay, in the wide range in which we are encompassing it within NECSUS, is – to adapt the title of Massimo Bontempelli’s novella that Raúl Ruiz filmed as The Comedy of Innocence (2000) – the ‘child of two mothers’. At least two! There is the tradition of research and experimentation that comes through avant-garde film and video, particularly all that is gathered under the rubric of found footage work. The subject of this kind of audiovisual essay is not restricted to but tends at its primary level to be focused on the critique or examination of cinema itself in some respect – particular filmmakers or genres, specific movies or fragments therein, or a more theoretical aspect of the ‘cinematic machine’ in general, as a medium and as a part of cultural history. Then there is the essay-film (or film-essay), that historic breakaway from supposedly objective documentary which stresses the elements of the personal and the reflective, and which has itself spawned many sub-forms in the digital age. Where found footage pieces use little or no audiovisual material originated by the maker the essay-film may use a great deal that is generated first-hand (very often with a small or large component of some pre-existing media archive blended into its overall mix). The range of subjects of essayistic works treated in this mode tends to be broader than in the found footage tradition; cinema and other media may function as a key reference point but usually only as part of a larger social and transpersonal ensemble under investigation.

These are not intended as hard-and-fast categorical distinctions. As always, anything that is deemed by some commentator to be a genre, type, model, template, or tradition has usually already produced ample examples of hybrid combination, anti-type, or peculiar exaggerations of the posited form. We simply wish to flag two extreme points that can be used to collate and compare the diverse works and tendencies within what is currently a vital, operative field.

In the present academic climate, and in light of the resistances to and questions about the audiovisual essay that sometimes arise, a dual campaign needs to be waged, exerting pressure from two sides. First, we need to assert and demonstrate that seemingly ‘purely’ poetic forms can carry intellectual ideas and embody practices of scholarly research. This is more a matter of fighting ingrained perceptions and assumptions (even among humanities scholars) than of changing the nature of artistic work itself – although that too has been entering a new, hybridised phase in our era of ‘PhDs through practice’ and research-driven art, as more and more practitioners abandon the once fragile and now completely crumbling economy of cultural subsidies and choose to enter the academy to pursue their lifetime of work.

Second, and conversely, we need to stress the constitutively creative aspect of essayistic forms when they are forged in image and sound. The traditional academic habit of both beginning with words (in the form of a plan, such as a pre-written script or structured outline) and ending with words (as final justification and elucidation) is challenged by a great deal of work appearing under the audiovisual essay umbrella. Godard himself was probably the first to articulate this problem back in the late 1970s when he explained to television commissioners that his forthcoming found footage/essay works (including Histoire(s) ) would not proceed from a pre-formulated script but be arrived at solely within the editing process itself, in order that an idea could be seen and heard in a new and more direct way. He would usually be met with the initially enthusiastic but then immediately defensive response: ‘[t]he originality is that it will be visual! […] But can you tell us how it will be visual?’ [2]

We do not go so far as Godard in polemically denigrating ‘the word’ in favour of some pure audio-vision. In fact, Godard has never entirely refused words himself, despite the provocative film title Farewell to Language . It is rather the case that in our much-vaunted age of multimediality , intermediality , and transmediality , we should practice what we preach. All the diverse elements of media (image, sound, graphic design, text, etc.) are available for us to use in different combinations, and we stand only to gain from exploring the possibilities of this ‘infinite semiosis’.

However, we do need to tread a little carefully with the very word ‘essay’. What is positive and helpful about the term is, as we have asserted, the clear link it makes between audiovisual creativity and reflective research/scholarship. Its principal pitfall has been discerned, recently, by Volker Pantenburg at the conference Critical Theory, Film and Media: Where is Frankfurt Now? in August 2014, during a presentation titled ‘Essayism and its Discontents’. Pantenburg argued that in celebrating the potential of the essay (in whichever medium) to be digressive, reflective, subjective, and so forth, we court the risk of freezing and reifying it into a genre with fixed characteristics – a paradoxical and indeed self-defeating gesture, since it amounts to a way of regularising and codifying what is meant to be surprising, inventive, and boundary-breaking. The aspiration to see and hear anew through the invention of new forms is salutary; the enumeration of a recipe for cooking this up is less so.

As Pantenburg (alongside Hito Steyerl in 2011) reminds us, the essay came into being not only with the famous, founding reflectivity/subjectivity of Montaigne, but very shortly after with the ‘moral instructions’ of Francis Bacon. Our commonplace experience today confirms this sometimes self-cancelling duality: while the essay-as-experiment triumphantly belongs to the tradition of Roland Barthes, Judith Williamson, Walter Benjamin, Christa Wolf, or Ross Gibson, the essay-as-business-as-usual, the conservative and normative op-ed ‘think piece’, belongs to Clive James, Peter Fuller, James Wolcott, and a thousand other high-end journalists (sad confirmation of this can be found in James’ treatment of radical essayists including Benjamin and Marker in his appalling 2007 bestseller Cultural Amnesia ). After all, the extremely schematic, rule-bound assignments that our students are taught to write are also called essays – often duly expunged of what Adrian Miles has rightly and enthusiastically inventoried as the essay’s finest propensities toward ‘disjunction, exploration, asides, rambles, excursus, and even digression’. [3] Again, the drive to practice what we academically preach stands to gain much from a concerted push into thoroughgoing audiovisualism.

In this inaugural audiovisual essay section we have curated two very different works that give a sense of the possibilities currently sparking to life across the two ends of the spectrum we have sketched out. Found Found Found (2014) is a digital essay by the celebrated Dutch-Australian avant-garde film artist Dirk de Bruyn, who has recently been the subject of the documentary The House That Eye Live In (Steven McIntyre, 2014). Found Found Found might be seen to be taking as its point of departure the type of ‘personal travel diary’ which is a hallowed tradition in avant-garde cinema – especially as associated with Jonas Mekas who, increasingly today, approaches his own very intimately shot footage as a vast archive to revisit and re-edit. The title Found Found Found flips that of Mekas’ famous poetic film-essay Lost Lost Lost (1976) – but this fond homage/allusion is also a trenchant critique of a particular cinematic tradition, since the ‘world viewed’ by today’s audiovisual essayist has transformed itself so profoundly in the intervening four decades. Irony looms: what or who is exactly ‘found’ in de Bruyn’s piece?

Mixing, as he has done for some 35 years, an immersion in media theory (Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and particularly Vilém Flusser) with the free-play of abstract, structural, and poetic forms, de Bruyn produces a meditation on the type of ceaseless loss (of a sense of self, of geo-physical co-ordinates, and of social values) produced by a neo-capitalist world premised on international travel, social mobility, and all-pervasive communications networks. Its ‘argument’ is channelled all at once through a montage of visual and sonic fragments (many recorded by his digital camera) and through the sensations produced by light, colour, and rhythm. As ever, de Bruyn’s audiovisual art challenges us to think dynamically in frames, pixels, and micro-seconds, relentlessly tumbling one upon the next – to be a part of the sensorial, media-saturated world as it is experienced, on the move, but also to somehow get outside of it and view the logic of its ideological power structures.

Laura Lammer is a student in the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. As a participant in our practical/theoretical class on the audiovisual essay she produced a kinetic reflection on the ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ of U.S. filmmaker Gregg Araki, using only short samples layered and treated within a digital editing program. Her Smells Like Armageddon Day – Dreamlike Settings and Magnified Trash (2014) bypasses an excessive dependence on text-as-instruction in order to deliver its analysis through the careful arrangement, in multiple fragments and two major clusters, of the main strategies in Araki’s cinema as Lammer sees them: first, the often garishly-coloured environments in which his characters live; second, the types of fetish-objects that he presents in eye-popping, close-up inserts.

Lammer’s piece offers a clear case of something that an audiovisual essay can do which a written piece, no matter how detailed or brilliant, can scarcely touch: even the typical journalistic words I have just used (‘garish’ and ‘eye-popping’) do scant justice to the design-assault of colour, tone, shape, gesture, and vocal inflection that Lammer accumulates and co-ordinates in her montage. Through her work we can get closer analytically not only to what Araki’s films materially are but also to what a neo-cinephilic, subcultural taste for his type of cinema means and feels like, especially when scored to the music she selected. Smells Like Armageddon Day renews the possibilities for thinking in and through what has too often been hastily dismissed since the mid-1980s as the degraded ‘MTV-style’ music clip.

NECSUS is far from acting alone as an academic journal in acknowledging this current ‘moment’ of the rise of the audiovisual essay. [4] Clearly it is spreading in many directions at once – and this is all to the good. By tentatively circumscribing one spectrum or continuum of the field for the purposes of this section – with digital, found footage collage at one end and the film/media essay at the other – we hope to orient the thoughts and works of our contributors and readers toward those audiovisual possibilities that actively produce knowledge and ideas via the multiple paths of performative, material research.

Corrigan, T. The essay film: From Montaigne, after Marker . London: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Godard, J.-L. Introduction to a true history of cinema and television . Montreal: Caboose, 2014.

James, C. Cultural amnesia: Notes in the margin of my time . London: MacMillan, 2007.

Lebow, A (ed.). The cinema of me: The self and subjectivity in first person documentary . London: Wallflower, 2012.

Miles, A. ‘Materialism and Interactive Documentary: Sketch Notes’, forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film , 2014. Accessed via academia.edu

Rascaroli, L. The personal camera: Subjective cinema and the essay film . London: Wallflower Press, 2009.

Steyerl, H. ‘The Essay as Conformism? Some Notes on Global Image Economies’ in Der Essayfilm . Ästhetik und Aktualität , edited by S. Kramer and T. Tode. Konstanz, 2011.

[1] See Lebow 2012, Corrigan 2011, and Rascaroli 2009, among others.

[2] Godard 2014, p. xxxviii.

[3] Miles 2014, p. 2.

[4] Cinema Journal and Media Commons have sponsored [in]Transition ( http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/ ), which is in its third issue. One of that journal’s editors, Catherine Grant, via the REFRAME research platform of University of Sussex, has spearheaded an invaluable web resource titled The Audiovisual Essay ( http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/ ). The latter includes the proceedings of the conference Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory which was held in November 2013 in Frankfurt and organised by the present authors through Goethe University. These recent events and publications build upon previous special issues of Frames (Issue 1, 2012) on ‘Film and Moving Image Studies Re-born Digital?’ ( http://framescinemajournal.com/?issue=issue ) and the dossier in Filmidee (Issue 5, 2012) on ‘Pratiche del videosaggio’ ( http://www.filmidee.it/archive/34/category/144/category.aspx ). We should not forget the ongoing, vibrant focus upon audiovisual production in extra-academic, cinephilic endeavours including Transit ( http://cinentransit.com/ ), Press Play ( http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/ ) at Indiewire , Photogénie ( http://www.photogenie.be/photogenie_blog/ ), the Vimeo group Audiovisualcy ( https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy ), and the online extras provided by Sight & Sound as well as movie-streaming enterprises such as MUBI ( https://mubi.com/notebook ), Fandor ( http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/category/daily ), and the ‘Tan lejos, tan cerca’ section of Filmin ( https://www.filmin.es/blog/tag/Tan+lejos%2C+tan+cerca ).

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Martine Beugnet University of Paris 7 Diderot

Greg de Cuir Jr University of Arts Belgrade

Ilona Hongisto University of Helsinki

Judith Keilbach Universiteit Utrecht

Skadi Loist Film University Babelsberg  Konrad Wolf

Toni Pape University of Amsterdam

Maria A. Velez-Serna University of Stirling

Andrea Virginás  Babeș-Bolyai University

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• European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS)
• Further acknowledgements →

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Analyse and Invent: A Reflection on Making Audiovisual Essays

By cristina álvarez lópez and adrian martin.

Not only is the work we do para-textual in relation to the usual academic work on film; we ourselves are para-academics, in the sense that (like many other people) we are freelance film critics who find ourselves involved in occasional lecturing and teaching, programming, translation, the editing and publishing of magazines or journals, and so forth. Alongside all the different types of writing we do, individually or collaboratively, much of our energy these days goes into the ongoing, entirely domestic production of audiovisual essays. Cristina has been a pioneer in this field since the inception of Transit online magazine in 2009; Adrian joined the fun in 2012. Together we have signed 23 audiovisual pieces; there are also solo excursions.

The current trend of the audiovisual essay is the fruit of a complicated and diverse history or genealogy that various folk are still sorting out – usually according to their own polemical or institutional agendas. Suffice it to say, whether we nominate the founding texts as Jean Epstein in the early 1920s or Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s, the contemporary push toward ‘doing’ media analysis in an audiovisual form emanates from a widely shared sense of a need to embrace multi-modality : to not restrict ourselves, as scholars or critics, solely to the (considerable) powers of the written or spoken word. For the Scandinavian initiative Audiovisual Thinking , since 2010, the audiovisual essay looks to the twin legacies of semiotics in communication studies, and documentary media (see the 2012 survey “ Reflections on Academic Video ” by Thommy Eriksson and Inge Ejby Sørensen); for radical theorists and practitioners of contemporary literary translation, the inspiration comes from artists’ books, design, and music – all the varieties of linguistic and pictorial collage. For us, looking to a more specifically cinematic heritage, montage is king – mixed with notions from a century of appropriation art, and a philosophy of aesthetics that stresses the spectator’s ‘reading’ (or interpretation) of an audiovisual text as always, already a remaking or a figural ‘completion’ of it in some other form.

The audiovisual essay remains – uneasily for some – a hybrid form, in-between art and scholarship. Not yet artistic enough for certain artists and curators, too shackled by exposition and rational argument; too arty and open-ended for conventional scholars of the publish-or-perish variety. Widespread fear that the international copyright police will close in and shut the game down at any moment helps to stall this appropriation revolution. The audiovisual essay is likely to remain nervously wedged in this strange inter-space. But multi-modality does not mean (as it is sometimes, kindly or unkindly, taken to be) the ruthless suppression of all written/verbal/logically argued rationality; it signals, rather, that all elements and media are available to us as critic-analysts, and that we should use them in diverse combinations and permutations. In our experiments, we constantly try to shift our working dispositif into new shapes, along the already famous continuum between creative/poetic and explanatory/pedagogical.

Our deepest conviction is that in-depth analyses can indeed be formed and carried within a ‘pure’ audiovisual montage, without voice-over commentary (a device often used badly and clumsily). We insist (in our teaching as well) on the radical extremity of such montage action: on principle, we constantly break both the horizontal (linear) and vertical (image-sound synchronicity) dimensions of whatever we analyse; it is never simply a matter of arranging untampered-with ‘blocks’ (which is more common in video art). It has become clear to us that such works pose a new challenge to spectators, even long-trained academics: unlike some written articles, they cannot always be grasped or digested on just one ‘go through’. They demand a different kind of viewing, listening and apprehending skill – just as many movies do. Cristina’s Small Gestures (2014) on Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le silence de la mer (1949) is one such essay, made initially as a classroom demonstration:

We have often used a combination of writing-on-screen – taking in the main title, intertitles, and other graphical inserts of language – with audiovisual montage. This is the case with Phantasmagoria of the Interior (2015), viewable on subscription at Fandor website, or on the Arrow DVD/Blu-ray of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981); and Felicity Conditions: Seek and Hide (2014), our essay on Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door … (1947):

The somewhat simpler mode of such analysis often takes the form, in our work, of the audiovisual ‘study of a motif’ – not simply laid out in its repetitions (the super-cut temptation), but arranged in its transformations, the logic of which we aim to bring out and develop. Our piece on dance in the films of Philippe Garrel, All Tomorrow’s Parties (2014), follows such a method:

Accepting a commission from [in]Transition and Cinema Journal – to respond audiovisually to a written, scholarly, refereed text on Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) – we decided to dissolve our own prejudice; we worked, for the first time, with a scripted, voice-over narration, and the result was Against the Rea l (2015):

This assignment got us interested in the possibilities of voice-against-image, and the mix of this voice with a pre-given soundtrack. Just as, in our regular series for MUBI , we explore what it means to ‘accompany’ or collide an audiovisual essay with a critico-poetic text, here we quickly learnt that scripts must be savagely pared down and played off, in timings of literal micro-seconds, against the chosen audiovisual elements. We have since made, in this vein, five separate essays on Hou Hsiao-hsien (three of these commissioned by the Belgian Cinematek), including this one at Fandor, Stirring In: A Scene from Millennium Mambo (2015), originally prepared as part of a live ‘performance lecture’ (like our earlier work in 2013 on Leos Carax):

https://vimeo.com/130262978

Finally, toward the more poetic end of the spectrum, we frequently investigate the notion of what we call an imaginary scene : the combination of fragments from two or more films that, to some extent, are fused into a new unity, while still underlining their different properties for comparative analysis. To Begin With … (2015) investigates what it means to ‘open’ a narrative film; the unfolding of its elements, in audiovisual time and space, mirrors (and this is what we always aim for) the steps of its implicit ‘argument’:

And in Shapes of Rage (2015), we began from the simple observation that certain key scenes in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) reminded us closely of passages in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) – and proceeded to work intensively, via re-montage, on ‘superimposing’ the two. Only out of this process did the logic of an analysis emerge: one of the great advantages and joys of audiovisual essay work is that theoretical constructs no longer pre-exist and overdetermine what we find in the films (which is the sorry condition of a great deal of academic screen study). On the contrary, it’s our belief that audiovisual essays can take their makers in two directions simultaneously: both deeper into the text that they discover anew, and beyond it, into the necessary challenge of inventing a new, hybrid work of their own.

Notes on Contributors

Adrian Martin is a film critic and audiovisual essayist who lives in Vilassar de Mar, Spain. His most recent book is Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Palgrave), and he is co-editor of LOLA magazine .

Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic and audiovisual essayist who lives in Vilassar de Mar, Spain. Her work appears in (among other publications) Fandor, Mubi, Transit, Trafic, The Third Rail and Sight and Sound , and she is co-editor of the audiovisual essay section in NECSUS .

Filmography

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979) Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977) Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947) La Silence de la Mer (Jean Pierre-Melville, 1949)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (Walerian Borowczyk, 1981)

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• Audiovisual Essays as Empowering Pedagogical Tools for Students of Film Practice

As media educators are coming to understand, through developing scholarship, audiovisual essays enable the integration of theory and practice in the learning environment. In the context of tertiary, practice-based film schools, the merging of theory and practice is integral for students to understand and experience their craft, so they may find practical value in exploring and applying film studies concepts while also developing much needed critical skills. Due to the perception of film studies as something film scholars, not practitioners, “do” (Myer 2012, 3), student practitioners sometimes eschew the analysis of cinema for their own practical projects. However, the audiovisual essay provides a means to illustrate the important relationship between film studies and practice, so the two aren’t seen as separate areas but instead, work together to help inform the creation of more challenging and meaningful films. Moreover, in making audiovisual essays, student practitioners have an opportunity for reflective practice through their exposure to the communicative possibilities of film language and the potential socio-cultural impact they can make with their own film storytelling. In this paper, I outline the role of the audiovisual essay in a film studies module I deliver to students enrolled in a practice-based degree program at SAE Creative Media Institute (SAE) Australia, with the aim of bridging this perceived gap between film studies and practice. It is specifically the inclusion of reflection in this assessment that makes the process of creating audiovisual essays both meaningful and empowering for the student practitioner.

Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan (2013) have charted the different kinds of film school models in Australia, both public such as the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS, the national film school) and private such as SAE, and examined how these models represent a range of pedagogical approaches towards the training of emerging filmmakers. These approaches include an emphasis on providing either specialist (concentration on above- or below-the-line creative and technical film roles) or generalist (multi-skilling) training; industry-oriented approaches versus an auteurist /film-as-art model; providing a traditional syllabus that includes units on film theory and history or a modern approach that is responsive in its integration of the latest technological and pedagogical developments. However, for most film school models, the question of how these film schools “balance the practical and theoretical components of film education” (Goldsmith and O’Regan 2013, 153) is of concern. In their study, SAE is considered as industry-oriented, generalist and modern in its approach, implying a privileging of practice over theory. But what effect does this have for the student practitioner in relation to the development of integral screen literacy and critical thinking skills? and how can such skills inform the quality of students’ practice?

Clive Myer (2012) argues that the practice/theory divide has a detrimental impact on student filmmakers where they run the risk of making derivative and uninspiring films. He poses the question, “Are they challenging audiences, extending the language of practice and raising issues both social and aesthetic?” (2012, 2). Myer’s questions suggest the integral role practice-based film schools play in provoking their students to consider their films as socio-cultural artefacts. For student filmmakers undertaking practice-based film education, the audiovisual essay can provide a means for them to interrogate different kinds, styles and genres of films while challenging them to make critical connections between film practice and the socio-cultural and aesthetic impact of their work.

The making of audiovisual essays invites students to uncover and analyse the specific mechanisms and relationships of film structures used to engage audiences on emotional and cognitive levels that may have further socio-cultural impact. Catalin Brylla’s work on content analysis in the context of film education reveals how critical and reflective approaches in audiovisual essay production assists student awareness of these mechanisms. These benefits include

the potential to challenge or reduce social stereotypes, the ability to achieve greater originality through the avoidance of clichés, and the purposeful use of tropes/clichés/stock characters to streamline narrative exposition, intertextually stimulate spectators or persuade a target audience to adopt a particular attitude or behaviour (Brylla 2018, 151).

By asking them to analyse the content of films so as to become aware of how they function, students also reflect on their own preferences and responses to them. This enables a consideration of the impact that content can have. In identifying and uncovering the language that creates representations such as harmful social stereotypes, students can learn to avoid “re-presenting” them in their own films. Activities of analysis and reflection therefore become part of the process for student filmmakers in the creation of audiovisual essays, in the hope that this awareness is translated and integrated into their film practice. This point will be discussed further in the context of SAE Creative Media Institute’s film studies module and the design of its audiovisual essay assessment.

The audiovisual essay at SAE

At SAE, the audiovisual essay is an assessment for film students in trimester two of their Bachelor of Film Production program. It has been an assessment since 2013 when studio-style modules were introduced in a new degree which enhanced the practical nature of the program. The modules were designed to iteratively advance the students’ filmmaking skills as they worked towards their final capstone productions. The film studies module runs each trimester with a new cohort sized anywhere from ten (mid-year intakes of alternative entry and mature age students) to sixty (the February intake of secondary school leavers). These students have already completed practice-based foundational modules in screenwriting, cinematography and editing, and a module introducing critical thinking and communication in creative media. Therefore, students come to film studies equipped with the basic skills needed for audiovisual essay making. The early weeks of the film studies syllabus revises and extends on the elements of film language previously experienced in trimester one modules but through the dual lenses of authorship and audience. The students are therefore asked to consider how they can communicate their stories through film language and how their stories can impact their audiences, by analysing the work of established filmmakers.

The assessment brief asks students to create a ten-minute audiovisual essay that analyses how film language is used to communicate subtext in a film of their choice. Subtext was chosen as the focus so that students can begin to consciously recognise how films communicate something more about the world beyond the level of plot, or as filmmaker Alex Buono (Film Riot 2017) suggests, “a film without subtext is meaningless.” As with a traditional essay, in the design of the subtext audiovisual essay, students need to make a clear argument detailing the film’s subtextual message as they see it, a methodology for analysis (textual/content analysis), and incorporate appropriate research as support (Hinck 2013). Through this process, students are exercising key critical thinking skills, research and analysis, but within the familiarity of their practice—choosing and sequencing clips, creating their argument through montage techniques and narration, and illustrating their points with examples and support. What becomes crucial for these students, however, is reflecting on this process. With the current iteration of SAE’s film studies module, reflection takes place in a more informal way through in-class discussion once the essays are completed. In future module development, however, reflection will be formalised through the inclusion of supporting documentation, such as journal entries, detailing the student’s key learnings and insights for their future practice.

Audiovisual essays as reflective practice

By incorporating reflection as part of the audiovisual essay making process, film students can “glean useful narrative or visual elements from existing films and use precedents to develop and communicate the vision for their projects” (Schoenfeld 2010). Reflection empowers student practitioners to actively close the gap between theory and practice for themselves and reiterates that film practice requires both critical and creative skills. In this context reflection also places the student’s experience of creating the audiovisual essay at the centre of their learning and underpins the development of their practice.

Informally, SAE students have provided anecdotal feedback in class discussions on the usefulness of the audiovisual essay for their filmmaking practice. For example, one mature age student from a 2018 cohort noted that the process made them explore the film’s meaning beyond the levels of plot and dialogue, stating, “it’s made me more conscious of the subtle techniques like the soundtrack, the lighting, the cinematography [that] I would definitely have missed. It’s now a wider scope to look at subtext.” Another student from that group commented:

When I go and look with that [critical] eye, it makes a huge difference…it wasn’t until I looked at the mise-en-scène , that’s why [the film’s theme] is “divinity” and then how the cinematography and the music amplify that.

Here we can see the beginnings of student filmmakers engaging more critically with the craft of filmmaking to communicate further meaning. The next stage in this assessment is to develop a more rigorous reflective component and a method for tracking whether these new skills and knowledge are having an impact on both the kinds and quality of films produced by SAE students. At this stage it is only speculative, but it is hoped that the audiovisual essay contributes to the challenging of reductive stereotypes with more diverse socio-cultural representations, as well as increasing the aesthetic quality, in the films produced throughout the degree.

Not only does the audiovisual essay close the gap between theory and practice, it also emboldens filmmaking students to become more critical and self-aware practitioners. By placing their experience of films as both filmmakers and spectators at the centre of their learning, student practitioners can better understand the communicative ability and audience impact of their craft. Ultimately, we want our future filmmakers to feel empowered to make interesting, creative, challenging, and more meaningful cinema reflecting a diversity of representations, and the audiovisual essay offers student practitioners a way of developing this potential.

Brylla, Catalin. 2018. “The benefits of content analysis for filmmakers.” Studies in Australasian Cinema, 12, (2-3): 150-161. https://doi: 10.1080/17503175.2018.1540097

Film Riot. 2017. “Add Depth to Your Film Using Visual Subtext” Uploaded August 19, 2017. Video, 14:32. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I8MRE47Hv4

Goldsmith, Ben. and Tom O’Regan. 2013. “Beyond the Modular Film School: Australia Film and Television Schools and their Digital Transitions.” The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia and Asia , edited by Mette Hjort, 149-163. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hinck, Ashley. 2013. “Framing the Video Essay as Argument.” Cinema Journal: The Journal of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, 1, no. 2 (Spring/Summer). http://teachingmedia.org/framing-the-video-essay-as-argument/

Myer, Clive. 2012. “Introduction.” Critical cinema: Beyond the theory of practice , edited by Clive Myer, 1-8, New York: Columbia University Press.

Schoenfeld, Carl. 2010. “The Troubles of trying to explain an Economic Art: Implementing Reflective Film Analysis.” Paper presented at the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association Conference 2010 , London, UK. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/events/MeCCSA/pdf/papers/Schoenfeld%20Reflective_Film_AnalysisMeCCSA.pdf

Sian Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer at SAE Creative Media Institute and Festival Director of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival. Her research interests include contemporary and historical screen exhibition, Australian women’s screen practice and audience engagement. Her work has appeared in Historic Environment , Peephole Journal, the National Film and Sound Archive , and AFI Research Collection .

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Audio Narrative Essay

Use audio to transform a traditional narrative essay.

An audio narrative essay or ‘radio essay’ is an essay designed to be heard as a voice recording rather than read silently as text. The audio narrative essay project follows many of the same steps as writing a traditional essay, but incorporates principles of audio composition, such as strategic use of sound effects. In this project you will write an essay meant to be read aloud and record it, enhancing it with sound. Finally, you will share your essay to the cloud.

• Storytelling

Learning Goals

After you finish this activity you will be able to:

• Research and better understand a subject
• Make a quality audio recording
• Do basic audio editing, combining voice and music tracks

Share your work to the cloud

• Assignment Rubric

Instructions

Follow these steps to complete the project.

To track your progress, click each step as you finish.

Get inspired

An excellent first step in creating any media work is to examine exemplary works of the same type. Make a list for yourself of what makes these examples strong and inspiring.

Don't skip this step!

Tame your tools

By growing your skills in the tools used in any project, you save yourself time and produce stronger work.

Create a folder to store project resources

When beginning a new media project, it's best to organize your resources in a single location.

Alternate File Storage You may also organize your documents in cloud storage, such as Box or Google Drive .

Plan your essay

The narrative essay differs from a research essay in both form and function: 1) It doesn't rely heavily on research, and 2) It is narrated as a story. Additionally, the audio narrative essay is meant to be narrated verbally, instead of read.

• ex., 'Discipline is remembering what you want!' (hook -- open w/ a quote) ×
• ex., Define procrastination and how many people suffer through it. ×
• ex., Introduce the time when procrastination was preventing my success. ×

Write your essay

As you write, structure your essay as a series of scenes and make notes about secondary sound (effects or music) that could enhance your listener’s experience of those scenes.

Choose (and use) your recording equipment

There are several options for recording your narrative essay, from using professional equipment to using your own mobile device or computer.

• Sound Booth
• OIT Audio Equipment
• Mobile Device

The Hesburgh Libraries offers a sound-dampening Sound Booth with fabric walls in which you can record high-quality audio using your own laptop. For the best audio, we recommend you borrow a USB microphone .

Book the Sound Booth

Bookings do not include assistance with using the studio. For assistance, contact the Media Corps .

Faculty, staff and students may reserve audio recording equipment from OIT, such as the Tascam audio recorder .

Equipment used for class assignments may often be reserved for free for brief periods. For more information, or to borrow equipment visit the OIT:

DeBartolo 115 (574) 631-6423 [email protected]

While the sound will be of higher quality using professional equipment, you may record your narrative essay with your own computer or mobile device. Audacity is a free, cross-platform application for recording and editing sound on a computer. There are also many apps available for recording your voice on a mobile device. One good option is the free app VoiceRecord Pro :

• VoiceRecord Pro (iOS)
• VoiceRecord Pro (Android)

For instructions on using VoiceRecord Pro to record audio, see Tame Your Tools . Note that you will need an adapter if you intend to connect a professional quality microphone to you phone or mobile device.

Choose a soundtrack

Now, you'll choose a soundtrack to layer behind your essay. Make sure to choose music that matches the theme and tone of the essay.

Giving Proper Attribution If you choose the "Attribution required" option, you must credit the composer of any music you use in your project.

Choose sound effects

Layering sound effects into your narrative essay can certainly enhance the storytelling. If you use sound effects, remember that less is more—err on the side of subtlety.

Create an Audacity project

Now, you'll create an audacity project for layering together all the audio you've found and created.

Import your audio tracks

Next, we'll import your recorded narrative essay file(s) and your soundtrack and any sound effects into your new Audacity project.

Edit and sync your tracks

In this step, you will edit each of your tracks, layering and syncing them so that they sound like one polished audio track, beginning to end. Remember that the volume level of the soundtrack should be low enough that it underscores your reading of the essay rather than dominating it.

Export your finished project to an MP3

Now, you'll need to export your narrative essay to a format which can be shared on the web, such as MP3.

In this last step, you'll upload your essay to Soundcloud, to share with others.

Congratulations!

You've grown your multimedia literacy while creating cool things! Well done, you!

You might consider nominating work you are proud of to the Remix Project Showcase !

Walkthrough

Watch a walkthrough for this project.

Get Inspired

Explore examples of similar projects.

• We Believe We Are Invincible Audio Essay
• This American Life This American Life
• This I Believe This I Believe
• Beauty in Imperfection Anna Kluender
• Sweeping Statements Judith Sloan

Tame Your Tools

Master the skills used in this project.

• Basic Audio Recording Audio Technica
• Voice Over Tips Voice Acting 101
• How to Write a Narrative Essay That Stands Out Naomi Tepper
• Record Great Audio with your Smartphone StoryGuide
• Recording Audio with Voice Record Pro Nick Parkin

Notre Dame has many helpful resources, including our Media Corps coaching staff , located in the Hesburgh Library.

Give Feedback

Remix is continually evolving. Please help us improve by providing feedback on this project or any other feature of Remix.

All progress will be reset for this project. Are you sure?

What Is a Video Essay? Definition & Examples Of Video Essays

A video essay consists of a series of videos that collectively, present an in-depth analysis or interpretation of a given subject or topic.

In this way, a video essay can be thought of as a condensed version of a lengthy written article.

VIDEO ESSAY

What is a video essay.

A video essay is an audio-visual presentation of your thoughts on a topic or text that usually lasts between 5 and 10 minutes long.

It can take the form of any type of media such as film, animation, or even PowerPoint presentations.

The most important thing to remember when creating a video essay is to include voiceover narration throughout the whole project so that viewers feel they are listening in on your thoughts and ideas rather than watching passively.

Video essays are typically created by content creators’ critics to make arguments about cinema, television, art history, and culture more broadly.

Ever wondered how ideas unfold in the dynamic world of video?

That’s where video essays come in.

They’re a compelling blend of documentary and personal reflection, packed into a visually engaging package.

We’ll dive deep into the art of the video essay, a form that’s taken the internet by storm.

In this article, we’ll explore how video essays have revolutionized storytelling and education.

They’re not just a person talking to a camera; they’re a meticulously crafted narrative, often weaving together film footage, voiceover, text, and music to argue and inform.

Stick with us as we unpack the nuances that make video essays a unique and powerful medium for expression and learning.

Components Of A Video Essay

As storytellers and educators, we recognize the intricate elements that comprise a video essay.

Each component is vital for communicating the essay’s message and maintaining the audience’s engagement.

Narrative Structure serves as the backbone of a video essay.

Our crafting of this structure relies on a cinematic approach where the beginning, middle, and end serve to introduce, argue, and explore our ideas.

Film Footage then breathes life into our words.

We handpick scenes from various sources, be it iconic or obscure, to visually accentuate our narrative.

The Voiceover we provide acts as a guide for our viewers.

It delivers our analysis and commentary, ensuring our perspective is heard.

Paired with this is the Text and Graphics segment, offering another layer of interpretation.

We animate bullet points, overlay subtitles, and incorporate infographics to highlight key points.

Our sound design, specifically the Music and Sound Effects , creates the video essay’s atmosphere.

It underscores the emotions we wish to evoke and punctuates the points we make.

This auditory component is as crucial as the visual, as it can completely change the viewer’s experience.

We also pay close attention to the Editing and Pacing .

This ensures our video essays are not only informative but also engaging.

The rhythm of the cuts and transitions keeps viewers invested from start to finish.

In essence, a strong video essay is a tapestry woven with:

• Narrative Structure – the story’s framework,
• Film Footage – visual evidence supporting our claims,
• Voiceover – our distinctive voice that narrates the essay,
• Text and Graphics – the clarity of our arguments through visual aids,
• Music and Sound Effects – the emotive undercurrent of our piece,
• Editing and Pacing – the flow that maintains engagement.

Each element works Along with the others, making our video essays not just informative, but also a cinematic experience.

Through these components, we offer a comprehensive yet compelling way of storytelling that captivates and educates our audience.

The Power Of Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling harnesses the innate human attraction to imagery and narrative.

At its core, a video essay is a compelling form of visual storytelling that combines the rich tradition of oral narrative with the dynamic appeal of cinema.

The impact of visual storytelling in video essays can be profound.

When crafted effectively, they engage viewers on multiple sensory levels – not just audibly but visually, leading to a more immersive and memorable experience.

Imagery in visual storytelling isn’t merely decorative.

It’s a crucial carrier of thematic content, enhancing the narrative and supporting the overarching message.

By incorporating film footage and stills, video essays create a tapestry of visuals that resonate with viewers.

• Film Footage – Brings concepts to life with cinematic flair,
• Stills and Graphics – Emphasize key points and add depth to the narrative.

Through the deliberate choice of images and juxtaposition, video essays are able to articulate complex ideas.

They elicit emotions and evoke reactions that pure text or speech cannot match.

From documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth to educational content on platforms like TED-Ed, video essays have proven their capacity to inform and inspire.

Sound design in video essays goes beyond mere accompaniment; it’s an integral component of storytelling.

Music and sound effects set the tone, heighten tension, and can even alter the audience’s perception of the visuals.

It’s this synergy that elevates the story, giving it texture and nuance.

• Music – Sets the emotional tone,
• Sound Effects – Enhances the realism of the visuals.

Crafting a narrative in this medium isn’t just about what’s on screen.

It requires an understanding of how each element – from script to sound – works in concert.

This unity forms an intricate dance of auditory and visual elements that can transform a simple message into a powerful narrative experience.

The Influence Of Video Essays In Education

Video essays have become a dynamic tool in academic settings, transcending traditional teaching methods.

By blending entertainment with education, they engage students in ways that lectures and textbooks alone cannot.

How To Create A Powerful Video Essay

Creating a compelling video essay isn’t just about stitching clips together.

It requires a blend of critical thinking, storytelling, and technical skill.

Choose a Central Thesis that resonates with your intended audience.

Like any persuasive essay, your video should have a clear argument or point of view that you aim to get across.

Research Thoroughly to support your thesis with factual data and thought-provoking insights.

Whether you’re dissecting themes in The Great Gatsby or examining the cinematography of Citizen Kane , your analysis must be thorough and well-founded.

Plan Your Narrative Structure before jumping into the editing process.

Decide the flow of your argument and how each segment supports your central message.

Typically, you’d include:

• An intriguing introduction – set the stage for what’s coming,
• A body that elaborates your thesis – present your evidence and arguments,
• Clearly separated sections – these act as paragraphs would in written essays.

Visuals Are Key in a video essay.

We opt for high-quality footage that not only illustrates but also enhances our narrative.

Think of visuals as examples that will bring your argument to life.

Audio selection Should Never Be an Afterthought.

Pair your visuals with a soundtrack that complements the mood you’re aiming to create.

Voice-overs should be clear and paced in a way that’s easy for the audience to follow.

Editing Is Where It All Comes Together.

Here, timing and rhythm are crucial to maintain viewer engagement.

We ensure our cuts are clean and purposeful, and transition effects are used judiciously.

Interactive Elements like on-screen text or graphics can add a layer of depth to your video essay.

Use such elements to highlight important points or data without disrupting the flow of your narrative.

Feedback Is Invaluable before finalizing your video essay.

We often share our drafts with a trusted group to gain insights that we might have missed.

It’s a part of refining our work to make sure it’s as impactful as it can be.

Remember, creating a video essay is about more than compiling clips and sound – it’s a form of expression that combines film criticism with visual storytelling.

It’s about crafting an experience that informs and intrigues, compelling the viewer to see a subject through a new lens.

With the right approach, we’re not just delivering information; we’re creating an immersive narrative experience.

What Is A Video Essay – Wrap Up

We’ve explored the intricate craft of video essays, shedding light on their ability to captivate and inform.

By weaving together compelling visuals and sound with a strong narrative, we can create immersive experiences that resonate with our audience.

Let’s harness these tools and share our stories, knowing that with the right approach, our video essays can truly make an impact.

Remember, it’s our unique perspective and creative vision that will set our work apart in the ever-evolving landscape of digital storytelling.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is visual storytelling in video essays.

Visual storytelling in video essays is the craft of using visual elements to narrate a story or present an argument, engaging viewers on a sensory level beyond just text or speech.

Why Is Visual Storytelling Important In Video Essays?

Visual storytelling is important because it captures attention and immerses the audience, making the content more memorable and impactful through the integration of visuals, sound, and narrative.

What Are The Key Elements Of A Powerful Video Essay?

The key elements include a central thesis, thorough research, a well-planned narrative structure, high-quality visuals, fitting audio, effective editing, interactive components, and a compelling immersive narrative experience.

How Do I Choose A Central Thesis For My Video Essay?

Choose a central thesis that is focused, debatable, and thought-provoking to anchor your video essay and give it a clear direction.

What Should I Focus On During The Research Phase?

Focus on gathering varied and credible information that supports your thesis and enriches the narrative with compelling facts and insights.

What Role Does Audio Play In Video Essays?

Audio enhances the visual experience by adding depth to the narrative, providing emotional cues, and aiding in information retention.

How Can Interactive Elements Improve My Video Essay?

Interactive elements can enhance engagement by allowing viewers to participate actively, often leading to a deeper understanding and connection with the content.

Why Is Feedback Important In Creating A Video Essay?

Feedback is crucial as it provides insights into how your video essay is perceived, allowing you to make adjustments to improve clarity, impact, and viewer experience.

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A video essay is a type of video that is used to present a single, cohesive argument or idea. They can be used to communicate a complex idea in a way that is easy to understand. They can also be used to show how a

It is indeed.

Absolutely, Greg.

Great post! I found the definition of video essays to be particularly insightful.

As someone who is new to the world of video essays, it’s helpful to understand the different forms and purposes of this medium. The examples you provided were also enlightening, particularly the one on the First Amendment.

I’m looking forward to exploring more video essays in the future!

I found this post to be incredibly informative and helpful in understanding the concept of video essays.

As a budding filmmaker, I’m intrigued by the idea of blending traditional essay structure with visual storytelling. The examples provided in the post were particularly insightful, showcasing the versatility of video essays in capturing complex ideas and emotions. I can’t wait to explore this medium further and see where it takes me!

I found this post really fascinating, especially the section on the different types of video essays. I never knew there were so many variations!

As a student, I’m definitely going to start experimenting with video essays as a way to express myself and communicate my ideas. Thanks for sharing!

Interesting read! I’m curious to explore more video essays and see how they can be used to convey complex ideas in an engaging way.

Appreciate the comment

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Articulating Scholarly Research with Audio-Visual Writing

Key takeaways.

To articulate scholarly research using richer methods of communication than straight text, students can apply audio-visual writing tactics.

Audio-visual writing uses video, photos, graphics, sound, and multimedia to explore sometimes advanced research concepts.

Students can employ various technologies to obtain the elements for their productions and other technologies to process and combine them in a smoothly blended presentation.

In addition to the pedagogical benefits of these projects, students learn how to use new technologies and develop stronger critical thinking and analysis skills .

In concise terms audio-visual writing is the articulation of scholarly research using video, photos, graphics, sound, and multimedia with text in a (usually) time-based presentation. I like to consider how the different forms of audio-visual writing relate to the different times in a student's career at the institution. Something like digital storytelling is really useful at an introductory level, for example. It's simple — assembling photos, including some voiceovers and sound, maybe inserting a little video here and there — yet it reinforces critical thinking and analysis skills.

"Frames of Mind," Jordan Tynes and Maurizio Viano, [in] Transition 2.1, Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies , March 2015

On the other end of the spectrum lie rigorous video essays, which have been used by students as a method for submitting thesis-level research. Students frequently write papers that respond to something visual they can document. Maybe they're analyzing a film, for instance, and so will digitize the film and go back and forth between the visual form and the written form, negotiating the process until the two blend and become seamless. Some of my students are working on 10- or 15-minute presentations as video essays. It's great to see these rich projects as the end result of a student studying audio-video materials across a four year degree.

I've also asked students to do video blogs, which get them more conversationally competent with the content of a course. They do some readings, maybe watch some screenings, study data of some kind, and then verbally respond to the materials and document their learning in a creative way. That engaged process gets them thinking rigorously and speaking fluently about the subject.

Podcasts have similar benefits. I ask students to create podcasts in the form of an essay. Sometimes they're a series; sometimes they're really long, one-off projects. There are lots of different ways to do podcasts — those are just some examples. All of which usually involve multiple voices and perspectives contributing to a topic.

You can take the technology that's common in all of those projects and play with the form that interests the student or faculty member, responding to how they want to articulate the concepts using different formats. The options are multifaceted and can be richer than solely text-based scripts.

"For my video essays, I usually assemble all of the footage first and before writing a script. Editing it all together makes the argument for me.... As a CAMS major we are taught to think about images and their relationship to each other. We reach so much more of our potential when we are allowed to do academic work in which we practically apply what we've learned." —Carlyn Lindstrom, Class of 2017

The Technology

The resources available to students differ depending on where they are in their career at the college. I almost always design assignments to use the technology I have and can support. At an introductory level I might standardize the technology students use, such as giving them all the same camera. I might give them access to the same editing software so that everybody's sort of on the same level. Later I might open it up and say, "Okay, if you have a camera that you'd rather use, or if you have a different way of editing things, then you can try that." Sometimes in those cases students will inspire each other: "Wow, what they're doing is really cool. Can we train that way as well?" If I can support it, I often bring that particular method into the course.

I want to caution that audio-visual writing is a subjective exercise, not a big experiment in technology. I try to keep the tools from becoming a distraction to the students by making small adjustments throughout the semester, even in a foundational course. The technique has proven itself a good one to get students thinking about deep concepts implied by the course content, especially as first-years. In later years, students are empowered to explore more advanced tools for production, which might offer 10 or 15 ways of doing something rather than the few provided by simpler technology. As students carve their own path through the advanced technology, they are also creating a unique voice to parallel the concepts communicated by their research.

When it comes to visual and digital storytelling, assessment has to change a bit. In addition to the textual content (voiceovers, etc.), there is also a visual element. Each assignment must make clear how much value will be placed on the aesthetic considerations when the project is assessed. If a student has successfully understood the content or the course goals and has managed to blend those well with an intentionally selected method or form of production, then I only make minor changes to my methods for assessment. If I'm asking students to produce a video essay, I might evaluate whether they are taking the project seriously, with appropriate attention to detail. These are things I consider when evaluating writing of any kind.

"The making of an audiovisual essay is a creative process: just like a filmmaker, I must consider how to combine text, music, video, and what their combined effect will be. Being able to explore and convey my reactions through audiovisual writing mobilized my creative forces to react as a participating viewer instead of a passive viewer." —Nicole Zhao, Class of 2020

I might also ask, what level of experimentation is the student attempting? I often ask them to submit a supplementary artist's statement. An artist's statement describes the student's intent and what they were trying to accomplish with this form of visual writing. If those match up — if what I get from their visual writing matches what they say they're trying to accomplish — then they've done a great job. An artist's statement creates another layer of critical analysis for the student, as well as a one-off rubric for evaluating a student's work.

Distributing the Experience

One of my biggest goals in supporting new media has been to scale technical knowledge involved in the production process and distribute it evenly across a student's four-year experience. To do this, I approach different disciplines and ask them what the literacy requirements are for their programs, and then I brainstorm about how these alternative forms of expressing research fit with their curricular goals. Coming up with an integrated plan for audio-visual writing projects across disciplines suggests related goals for a student across a four-year experience.

"In terms of learning curves, I would say I really started to pick it up after about 8 months of practice... Once I was introduced to the basics of Final Cut Pro, I was really able to run with texting formats, edits, etc. This medium, especially, lends itself to creativity and control even for amateurs... Moreover, I think the fact that the academic field is so new, is very exciting. Each time I do a project, I feel as though I'm actually contributing something of importance to the academic community." —Sophia Kornitsky, Class of 2019

What do students need to know about audio-visual writing techniques in their first year? Their second and third years? At each level, students are taking steps that build upon and expand their technical expertise, which help them meet requirements for their capstone projects. When the students graduate, what will they need to know about audio-visual writing and technologies to flourish in a work environment? How comfortable in this production process do they need to be? Certain relatively rigorous disciplines might not value visual writing at all, but they might be interested in some other form of new media. I want to break that down into logical elements and think about how those requirements can be evenly distributed across students' four-year experience at Wellesley.

"The Eye Is the Heart: Metropolis and the Kino-Eye," Sophia Kornitsky, Film Matters Magazine , March 17, 2017

Research and Experimentation

Research and development are relatively important in the area of audio-visual writing. If a discipline is interested in incorporating a type of new media that I've never heard of or am unfamiliar with, how can I research it and think about how a professional would produce something in that form? Then I need to break apart the process and think about how I can distribute it into the curriculum that already exists. When thinking about how to develop assignments, I realize that some of them might be relatively risky. Still, I think the greatest reward I've received from experimenting in these new forms comes from the highest risk situations — trying something in a class that's never been tried before. Those attempts require a relatively high amount of support from somebody who knows what they're doing technically. But if I can find a way to integrate the faculty member's goals for that course with the additional values they receive from that production, then the course will be more open to experimentation. I look forward to these opportunities to grow the methods and technologies used in audio-visual writing, with the goal of bringing my students along with me.

Jordan Tynes is the manager for Scholarly Innovations at Wellesley College.

© 2017 Jordan Tynes. The text of this article is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 .

The Audiovisual Essay

Practice and Theory in Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies

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GUIDE – Writing Process for Audio Essays

Step 1: rough draft.

If you’d like to produce an audio essay, the first step is to write a rough draft the same way you would for any other kind of essay project. You might find it useful to start with an outline or cluster map that helps you identify key moments in the story, or you might simply start drafting and see where the writing takes you, keeping in mind that what you’re working on is a rough draft that may need substantial revision.

Once you have a draft you can share with classmates, you’ll do so in a word processing document rather than in storyboard format, which is what your classmates will use for audiovisual or visual projects.

Here are a few writing tips:

Write in a conversational style.

You might find it helpful to imagine that you’re writing your story to a friend by email, so that you can break free from the typical academic essay style you may be accustomed to with other college papers.

Use vivid details that paint a movie in the listeners’ mind.

Listeners are far more likely to pay attention to your essay if it’s grounded in vivid, concrete details that enable them to imagine what you’re talking about, almost as though they can see it as a mental movie. Keep abstract observations to a minimum as these are harder for listeners to pay attention to. Concrete details might include descriptions of appearance, sound, smell, taste, or touch, as well as dialogue and observations about people’s behavior and personalities.

Use a simple and very clear method of organizing your essay.

Listeners can’t follow a complex organizational structure as easily as readers can, so keep your structure simple and easy to follow, and make generous use of topic sentences, transitions, foreshadowing, recaps, and other “sign posts” for your listeners.

STEP 2: TRIAL RECORDING

After you make further revisions to the transcript, it’s time to make a trial recording. When you listen to words conveyed as audio, you’ll gain insight into how to revise the transcript and also how to improve your delivery.

You’ll also gain experience with using the audio tools you’ll continue to use throughout the process.

For help making a trial recording, see the handout under the Composing with Audio category.

STEP 3: FULL DRAFT

After you receive feedback on your trial recording, the next step is to further revise the transcript to improve structure, writing style, and use of details to make the essay or story more appealing to those who will listen to it rather than read it.

You’ll also want to work on your delivery, so that the audio recording sounds natural and conversational rather than like someone reading a paper out loud. To hear what effective audio delivery sounds like, go to Audible.com and search for a fiction audiobook that gets high ratings for performance. Listen to the free sample and take note of what makes the delivery appealing.

At this stage you might also want to consider whether you’d like to incorporate some sound effects, like short segments of music in the opening, between major sections, and at the end. Music can help establish a mood or tone or signal a transition. It also gives listeners a brief moment to pause and reflect on what they’ve just heard.

For examples of how music and sound effects can enhance audio, try listening to a few stories from This American Life , which airs regularly on public radio.

For help making a full draft, see the handout under the Composing with Audio category.

STEP 4: FINAL VERSION

After you receive feedback on the full draft, you’ll take time to revise your transcript before you prepare a final recording, which should demonstrate proficiency with the technicalities of recording an essay or story for audio delivery. For example, your voice should be clear and easy to hear, and the recording should be free of any background noises or other distractions.

You’ll export the final version in mp3 format and upload it to the class blog, along with any additional materials described on the relevant assignment or calendar entry for your class.

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Avater: fusing audio, visual, and textual modalities using cross-modal attention for emotion recognition.

1. Introduction

• Development of MAViTE-Bangla, a multimodal Bangla emotion dataset containing 1002 multimodal samples labeled into four classes: anger, fear, joy, and sadness.
• Development of a pairwise cross-attention-based multimodal framework for effective emotion recognition and exploitation of several feature extraction and fusion methods to utilize multimodal features for MEC.
• Analysis of the classification outcomes of the proposed method with a detailed investigation of the misclassification of samples

2. Related Work

2.1. unimodal-based emotion recognition, 2.2. multimodal-based emotion recognition, 3. dataset description, 3.1. data collection, 3.2. data statistics, 4. methodology, 4.1. video network, 4.1.1. preprocessing, 4.1.2. feature extraction, 4.2. audio network, 4.2.1. preprocessing, 4.2.2. feature extraction.

• Hand-crafted Feature Extraction:
• Deep Feature Extraction:

4.3. Text Network

4.3.1. preprocessing, 4.3.2. feature extraction.

• Word Embedding
• Contextual Embedding

4.4. Pairwise Cross-Modal Attention

4.4.1. audio–video attention, 4.4.2. audio–text attention, 4.4.3. video–text attention, 4.5. fusion methods, 4.5.1. summation fusion, 4.5.2. concatenation, 4.5.3. average fusion, 4.5.4. hadamard product fusion, 4.6. proposed method, 5. experiments, 5.1. unimodal, 5.1.1. audio modality, 5.1.2. video modality, 5.1.3. text modality, 5.2. multimodal, 5.3. ablation study, 5.4. comparison with existing work, 5.5. error analysis, 6. discussion, 7. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Das, A.; Sarma, M.S.; Hoque, M.M.; Siddique, N.; Dewan, M.A.A. AVaTER: Fusing Audio, Visual, and Textual Modalities Using Cross-Modal Attention for Emotion Recognition. Sensors 2024 , 24 , 5862. https://doi.org/10.3390/s24185862

Das A, Sarma MS, Hoque MM, Siddique N, Dewan MAA. AVaTER: Fusing Audio, Visual, and Textual Modalities Using Cross-Modal Attention for Emotion Recognition. Sensors . 2024; 24(18):5862. https://doi.org/10.3390/s24185862

Das, Avishek, Moumita Sen Sarma, Mohammed Moshiul Hoque, Nazmul Siddique, and M. Ali Akber Dewan. 2024. "AVaTER: Fusing Audio, Visual, and Textual Modalities Using Cross-Modal Attention for Emotion Recognition" Sensors 24, no. 18: 5862. https://doi.org/10.3390/s24185862

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