Shannon Strucci joins the show to discuss life as a YouTube video essayist, developing one’s own video essay aesthetic, the relationship between video essay making and podcasting, and more! We also discuss Shannon’s epic video essay “Fake Friends Episode 2: parasocial hell” and Harry S. Plinkett’s (Mike Stoklasa) review of Star Wars Episode I: Phantom Menace, a seven part video produced by Red Letter Media. Listeners are assigned new homework: multi-screen videos.
Don’t Forget The Pod Now Has a Newsletter!
“Notes on Videographic Criticism” is a weekly newsletter and companion to the podcast. What does this newsletter entail? Short writings on video essays, news, links to newly published videographic work, information on the podcast, short interviews with creators, and more. Have thoughts on what should be in this newsletter? Tips? Videos? Articles? Events? Email me: willdigravio@gmail.com!
Homework: Multi-Screen Compositions
Thank you so much to everyone who made Videographic Epigraphs! They are all collected here, and those uploaded to Vimeo are in the showcase below. If you didn’t get a chance to make an epigraph, don’t worry! Email me the link at willdigravio@gmail.com and I will add it to the showcase and webpage. If I missed yours please let me know!
Your next assignment is a multiscreen composition. Here are the instructions from The Videographic Essay (Grant, Mittell, Keathley; 2019):
“When Chris was in graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of his professors reported that Dušan Makavejev, when he was teaching at Harvard, would randomly select two films and project them side-by-side, looking for ways in which the movies might show their potential for positive valence, echoing one another through visuals, sound, or dramatic intensity. The professor then tried it out himself with simultaneous projection of Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1966) and Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1966)—and it took only about five minutes for the films to seem to begin to ‘talk’ to one another. We wanted to capture something of this effect, so with this exercise, we asked participants to use a multi-screen process to construct a ‘response’ to one of the exercises produced by another member of the workshop. That is, they were to use their chosen film and integrate it with clips from one or more films used by other participants’ exercises. The video had to contain moments of both full-screen and multi-screen, including images from the film(s) the participant was responding to. All audio and visuals had to come from the maker’s chosen texts, peers’ exercises, or the objects chosen by other workshop participants.“
As I said on the podcast, you won’t be able to follow these instructions, in part because you don’t have access to the media of other listeners! So, for this assignment, just focus on making some sort of multi-screen video with at least two different media objects. Examples of multi-screen exercises can be found in the link above.


Preview to Episode 16. On Publishing the Video Essay
Our next episode will feature a roundtable discussion with three editors of publications that publish videographic work: Michael Leader of BBC’s Inside Cinema, Adam Woodward of Little White Lies, and Joost Broeren of Filmkrant. We will discuss what it is like to publish video essays, what video essays bring to a publication, tips for freelance video essayists, and more.
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