“text… is becoming more like video. And video is becoming more like text”
-Marilyn Freeman’s On the Form of the Video Essay Editor’s Note.
Writing a script for a video is a lot like the theory of audio itself, in that harmony is key to creating an engagingly entertaining essay, that ultimately can act as a product. For this Freeman suggests that “the video essay is playful, irrational, and fragmented.” Which can be examined in Kristen Radtke’s That Kind of Daughter where she vividly details a superficial shopping experience with her mother (without actually choosing/able to have the footage of the direct experience) and justifies it with her secretly witty defiance at 5:40. She’s happy she doesn’t fit her mother’s dress size, instead revealing held in feelings of oppression by her mother’s guidance and a sense of identity in knowing she is not her mother. To pack the punch even more her mother knows that the dress is to large for her. Basically she’s using her mother’s irrationality of going out shopping in secret to create a playfully fragmented story of solemn felt narrative. Which is a really cool idea for bringing back a memory like that. As I see it her mother doesn’t quite support her father’s work to the degree she’s expected. Kristen uses this video to show how she just sat and watched, because what else was there to do if she’s a girl and that’s what her mother is teaching her.
“The video essay’s nature is to mess with our expectations of nonfiction film. it is transparently self-questioning and self-conscious” (Freeman). John Bresland’s Mangoes is very aware of itself, and it does this by showing his resentment for having to retire his good old bachelor days for daddy days. Yet to completely mess with us (and give use the reason for the title) we learn that he’s allergic to Mangoes and so is his son. Which is the perfect plot twist to abstract the video just enough for something playfully conscious.
Freeman mentions that the video essay “speaks directly to the audience”, like in Bresland’s Mangoes he goes over how his life has been distorted by his baby , but he does this in a somewhat critical fashion. This isn’t a husband speaking to his wife, or to his baby. This is a man telling an unbiased audience “if baby loves it, I love it” (3:20). This narrative is what clicks with the audience and lets them see, oh ya, he does acknowledge that. Which contrasts a lot with Steven Chen’s essay that may be directed to a more personal audience.
Freeman goes as far to say,“this is between you and me.” Which is perfect for Chen’s essay Grandpa. Its on his dual heritage and at 4:30 he mentions wanting to be able to explain both his heritage’s to his children. This video essay is sort of his speak directly to his future children that explains just that. Because the essay wonderfully goes over how chaotic it can be for him, but how he doesn’t get overwhelmed because ultimately it is his family. This is What Freeman Highlights as the key to a good video essay, adding that voice that can really characterize itself as a valued one.