Video Essays / Video Ensayos

Best Practices

Creating a video essay project with your students may seem daunting, impossible and exciting. To help you and your students through the process, we have gathered a collection of guidelines, technical handouts and examples from instructors who have integrated video essay projects in their courses on Latin American cinema. The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image (Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, caboose books, 2016) is an excellent resource that focuses on the practice and pedagogy of videographic production. The book's updated companion page, The Videographic Essay: Practice & Pedagogy, includes a series of videographic exercises with sample clips, as well as practical suggestions for incorporating video essays in your teaching. Please remember to share your results with Cinegogía to help grow our collection of student video essays. If you are looking for information about how to publish scholarly videographic criticism, please visit our Videographic Scholarship module under Resources for Research.

Video Essay Guidelines

The following course materials may be helpful as you craft a video essay assignment or when guiding students through the technical steps of editing.

Video Essay Assignment (instructions for creating a 2-4 minute video essay focused on specific cinematography terms, using iMovie, screen shots, and voice-over narration)
Trabajos videográficos (scaffolded instructions in Spanish for creating three different but related kinds of videographic work: mosaico, análisis cinematográfico, epígrafe videográfico)
Video Essay Project (detailed instructions for guiding students through a 8-10 minute video essay project)
Proyecto de video ensayo (instrucciones detalladas en español para desarrollar un video ensayo de 6-8 minutos)
Tarea digital (series of scaffolded digital homework assignments designed to help students recognize film techniques and their function, and provide the technical practice needed for the more complex video essay)
Video Essay Assessment Rubric (evaluation tool for grading video essays)
Keathley, Christian. "Teaching Videographic Film Studies." The Cine-Files, no. 7, Fall 2014, https://www.thecine-files.com/keathley.

Technical Handouts

Adobe Premiere Pro Workshop (detailed instructions for using the editing program Adobe Premiere Pro to create a video essay)
Final Cut ProX Workshop (detailed instructions for using the editing program Final Cut to create a video essay sequence)
Video Capture using Camtasia (instructions for using the licensed program Camtasia to capture video and audio from films for use in video essays)

Student Video Essay Collections

Collection of video essays on Latin American films created by undergraduate students. Encourage your students to submit their work to our platform.

The Contemporary World Cinema Project includes student video essays on films from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, and Peru.

Submission of Student Video Essays

Students (or professors, with the creator's permission) may submit video essays for consideration to Cinegogía. Please note the following guidelines for publication:

Language(s): Spanish and/or English
Duration: 5-10 minutes (maximum)
Subject: Latin American, Caribbean or Latinx Film
Platform: Videos must be uploaded to Vimeo or YouTube. If selected for publication, the video essay will be assigned a permanent URL and reside on Cinegogía's Vimeo channel.
Include a title for the video essay, a short description of the project, course title and course number, name of professor, name of institution, graduation year, and your copyright preference.