While watching “Grandpa,” I think many people can relate when Steven Chen says “I’ve had deeper conversation with strangers on the bus.” Though I speak the same language with all my close and distance family, I usually feel like an outsider at big family dinners simply because I can’t connect or identify with them. Chen demonstrates that odd feeling at the beginning of his essay vividly by two contrasting colors: red and blue. I also noticed that the video’s background soundtrack that run throughout the story from the 10th second to the end of the essay. The track moving along with the story, with the images, appearing and disappearing very subtly in almost the same time frame of the video made it seem like it was always there, like it was meant to be, like it wasn’t purposely added afterwards by the author, just as how Freeman described the form of video essay, “There is no primacy. The video essay does not privilege literary text over image, nor image over text, or either over sound or vice versa.”
“That Kind of Daughter” by Kristen Radtke, on the other hands, seemed to me more of a audio essay with visual aid rather than a video essay, that only if I understood the form of video essay correctly. This essay gave me the same feeling of sitting in class listening to lectures being read from some PowerPoint with moving pictures. The third essay by John Bresland, “Mangoes,” comes with an emotional and compelling story about his child and wife. Without reading the description, I think we can guess that the video was filmed on an iPhone by quality of pictures and width of frames, which brings me to Freeman’s perspective of “the Broadcast Yourself media sphere,” where anyone and everyone can be an essayist because screens are now “in nearly every hand.”