Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Market Research: The Video Essay

As mentioned in previous posts, I have been working on developing the "video essay" for about a year and a half now. Although I always assumed someone else, somewhere else, was trying similar things, I hadn't found anything else out there. Until last week.

Dr. Pat Madden has been working as my mentor on this project and in a conversation with him last week he mentioned knowing something about a guy named John Bresland doing something similar. We looked him up and found that he has a website with a number video essays on it.

In addition to the videos, there was a link to an essay he wrote called, "On the Origin of the Video Essay" that was published in 2010 and explains the new genre. As I read it I couldn't believe how closely his thinking matched my own. Although I will admit I kind of liked the idea of being something of a pioneer with this new genre, I was really excited to see that he had already done so much with the same idea. In his short bio on the page it says that in 2013, the University of Chicago Press will be publishing a book, Crafting the Video Essay, co-authored by Bresland and Marilyn Freeman. The bio also mentions that he has had video essays published through Ninth Letter, Blackbird, and Fourth Genre which is great news because until now I wasn't aware of any literary journals that accepted video essay submissions.

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