Monday, December 2, 2013

Video essay, who knew?



What is a video essay?
I haven’t even heard of them until this class. How can a video be an essay and vice versa? Unthinkable, but it has been done and will continue to be done. The examples posted were each unique, and I think, very powerful. The unknown to me, like John Bresland, Claudia Rankin, and Lauren Mullen are now known through this transgender/transgenre class. But the really question is what is a video essay?
When I look online this is what I got.
“A video essay is a video work that explores a topic using various sources of information and that experiments with form and content. This genre combines various art forms (pictures, music, video, words, voice, etc.)”

And

GOOGLE web definitions
“a video which presents factual information about a specific topic.”

Although these are important, I think it is much more important to find the definition through watching them and experiencing them first hand. So that is what I’m going to do.
What is a video to me?
I think it is people capture moments of time or topics, through both word and visual scene.

For example, in the Mullen piece about the chair she shows the marks on the floor and explained they are like an archive. Which is beautiful and sad. So when she put the number on them counting up to her age. It was more than numbered archives, from me it looked like a crime scene where some died. Which maybe someone had…

Another example is from my favorite from all three, which is John Bresland. I like the Mangoes. Which even in the titles tell what the essay or topic is about. How his wife is allergic to mangoes, and he feed it to his son, because he wants his son to be strong, and maybe even depicted as manly. A man goes to different place to be manly. By having a bike or not wearing a baby pact. I also love how he layer the video like one would layer word like stein. So many story going on in one video MANGOES TO MAN goes.

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