Tom Brown reports on a recent staff/student workshop at KCL:
During the final week of April 2022, staff and students, largely from Film Studies, participated in a 5-day intensive workshop on “video essay” making. Video essays or “videographic film criticism” have thoroughly penetrated Anglophone film studies and this form of critical or creative practice is now widely recognised as a valid mode of research alongside traditional written scholarship – see, for example, the recent inauguration by Screen of an annual audiovisual essay award. The workshop was generously funded by the Department of Film Studies and a Faculty of Arts and Humanities Education Grant, and was taught by two eminent academic video essayists, Catherine Grant and Liz Greene. Catherine and Liz led workshop participants in seminars focused on the theory and practice of videographic film studies, launching a different exercise each day. Each afternoon, filmmaker Tim Partridge taught the necessary fundamentals of film editing.
Following the hugely influential “Middlebury model”, which has effectively seeded the practice in a range of international HE institutions (see for example many of the interviewees for Will DiGravio’s Video Essay Podcast), the emphasis of the workshop was “learning by doing” and getting beyond any sense of the video essay as an “illustrated lecture”. We were encouraged to use videographic practices as a form of material thinking about our objects of study and to see the Adobe Premiere Pro timeline as a tool through which to excavate, unpick and defamiliarize. Participants were asked to bring a video file of a single media object to the workshop (in most cases, this was a feature film) and were then set a different, strictly prescribed brief each day. The tightness of the constraints and the short time period allowed (set in the afternoon, the deadline was 9am the following morning) helped concentrate attention on the expressive potential of particular audiovisual techniques and shook us all out of our normal patterns of scholarly labour. The first exercise was the simplest: a videographic “PechaKucha”. This meant producing a 60 second video of exactly 10 clips of 6 seconds (the cuts had to be straight edits and the accompanying audio a continuous 60 seconds from the film in question).
This forged an initial productive encounter with the creative and scholarly impact of taking apart a film on an editing timeline and also pushed scholars towards a more “poetic” approach than their academic training would often encourage (the “poetic” Vs the “explanatory” is an influential distinction in scholarship on video essays – Keathley 2011). The videographic PechaKucha arguably has something in common with surrealist approaches to film viewing and produces a novel encounter with a film’s patterning.
“I thought the workshop was excellent. I loved the format, and, surprisingly, the prescriptive nature of the tasks, which removed inhibitions and allowed me to be much more creative than I would have been if I’d had free rein.”
Holly Isard, PhD candidate.
The second exercise was “epigraphic” in the sense that we were asked to use on-screen text and put that text in some dynamic and productive relationship with a sequence from our object of study. The text was in many cases an academic piece of writing not obviously about the film or media object in question, producing fascinating juxtapositions and points of productive “disjunction” (to follow Catherine Grant’s recourse to Rascaroli’s 2017 discussion of the “gaps and disjunctions” of the essay film, a cinematic genre related to the online video essay)
Day three saw the launching of the multi-screen exercise, whereby participants were asked to make a video of up to 3 minutes using a multi-screen technique – we were shown how to put two frames side by side and also use editing “key frames” in order to enable more complex arrangements of frames within the frame. Whereas the previous exercise bore a more obvious relationship to writing about film, the multi-screen exercise encouraged techniques with a less obvious equivalence in traditional scholarship.
The penultimate exercise was perhaps the most personally challenging for workshop participants because it demanded that we record and present our own voices. Many people do not enjoy the sound of their own recorded voice (not helped when severe time constraints forced more than one to record voiceover on their phone under a duvet or in a cupboard!). Brilliant work was produced but it was notable that only 1 of the final exercises (the “abstract trailers” discussed below) saw a participant use voiceover. Ian Garwood’s brilliant meta-critical video essay on “The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism” discusses many of the challenges that might explain this decision, as well as the impact of gendered discourses on the reception and thus production of open access videographic scholarship.
Each previous exercise had been designed to introduce not only new and further editing techniques but new and further conceptual issues with regards the video essay’s relationship to “traditional” research, scholarship and university pedagogy. The final exercise was the most open in terms of constraints/parameters (bringing previous techniques together) and was designed to act as an “abstract trailer” for a larger videographic project the participant(s) would plan to complete. The trailer was required to convey, as per a written abstract, the topic and approach of our planned project but also, crucially, its style and tone. It needed to relate to the conventions of the film trailer in some way.
All in all, in a short space of time, this workshop provided an environment for a wholesale revisioning for many of us of what the work of an academic film scholar can entail. The video essay emerged not merely as another means of dissemination (though its open access status makes it attractive on this front) but as offering a series of tools to generate new knowledge and understandings through contemporary audio-visual technologies. We all saw the enormous benefits of creative constraints and we collaborated in creating a lively and welcoming space where we learnt from each other as well as from our mentors. It is hoped that this experience will bear fruit for years to come in terms of participants creating videographic work, and also in imparting new understandings of audiovisual scholarship to our students.
“A fantastic experience in ‘learning by doing’, led by experts in the field. All aspects gelled together in perfect balance: theoretical overviews and discussion; accessible technical instruction; in-built time for practice and group feedback. The workshop provided a much-needed bridge between theoretical research and creative practice.”
Belén Vidal, Reader in Film Studies.
Thanks to all the participants who were happy to share their exercises. We have only presented one of each exercise but other exercises by workshop participants, Yung Lai, and the KCL-organiser of the workshop, Tom Brown, are available to view online.