 |
| "Malinois Flower Meadow". 5/4/14 via pixabay. Public Domain Dedication. |
The goal here it to make your audience as excited and attentive as this cute dog!
Because of this, I will be exploring Video Essays!
1. The purpose of Video Essays is pretty straight forward--to deliver an essay in an engaging, informative, but concise video with text, images, and film snippets of various types included. The goal of the essay matched the goal of the video, so it can be informative, argumentative, a summary, analytical.
2. This genre is found online, mostly on YouTube, but sometimes on other websites with the video attached. The context varies with purpose, but video essays generally exist when someone wants to deliver a message by talking about it while using videos, pictures, and other resources for emphasis.
"I Used To" by YouTube user Cassette Tape was made for a college application, "Inside Out: Emotional Theory comes alive" by user Nerdwriter1 was made to analyze the movie and its impact, and "Toy Ad and Learning Gender" by user feministfrequency was made to argue why ads targeted at young children are harmful due to the gender stereotyping depicted in the ads.
Video essays exist in a less formal, more personal context where a person can use their voice and face to deliver a message, instead of writing it down.
3. The audience for video essays is primarily the general public, because anyone can see these videos. The secondary audience is connected to the purpose. For the three video essays above, the audiences are most likely college admissions team, psychology students, and gender studies students, respectively.
However, the primary audience is more important because the video essay must be composed so the general public can understand it, not just specific people, which is what makes the videos so popular.
4. Key Features and Characteristics
- Under 10 minutes long
- Uses video clips, pictures, and text
- Voice over expressing message
5. My personal definition:
Video Essay: A short video that utilizes pictures, video, and text to deliver a variety of messages by the person in the video.
How do you feel about video essays? Are they effective, why or why not?
Reflection: After reading Sienna's blog post about video essays, I realized my blog posts are probably too long. We both wrote about video essays, yet her post was clearer and more to the point. Throughout the semester, one of my writing goals is to condense my writing!
Missy's post stated she was most terrified to do the video essay. This is also the project I am most nervous about. I like that she wrote about the genre that scares her the most, because know she has a lot of information on it and has seen examples so it will be easier to carry out the process later. Also, knowing about what to expect allows us to make important decisions that will dictate how we will create our video essays.
I agree with what you said about the video essays being less formal and more personal; that to me is a part of what will make it so scary to use this genre. Although it is probably the most entertaining of the genres, it can also be the one that explains information with the most depth, since there is so many ways to present it(text, audio, images). As a side note, I really like how you organized this post. Making key words bold and different colors is a good way to emphasize your words and make it interesting, I might have to steal the idea.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I am familiar with video essays in the sense that I enjoy watching an unhealthy amount of them within a day's period, I have never really looked into the logistics or conventions they usually have. From what I know, your post does accurately describe video essays! I do agree that they are more personal, which is one of the reasons I enjoy this genre so much. I think your writing was to the point and concise for the most part, but if I could recommend anything it would be to not list links in a long paragraph as it was a little bit hard for me to understand. This aside, I thought your post was informative and the aesthetic is really nice!
ReplyDelete