Each week, students should find a video essay published somewhere online and write a commentary on it. Commentaries should be posted before class on Wednesday morning. The commentary should strive to answer two basic questions: what did I learn from this video about the subject matter? and what did I learn from this video about the videographic form? Commentaries should be at least 250 words, but should be as long as necessary to explore the ideas.

To create a commentary post, Add Post within WordPress. Make sure you choose Video Commentaries as the category for the post. If possible, embed the video at the top of the post – if you paste the URL of a YouTube or Vimeo video, it will automatically embed. (For other sites, look for embed code or just link to the original.) Before publishing, you should choose whether to make you post Public (the default), meaning anyone online can see it, or Private, meaning only members of our class can see it. Just remember that if you are commenting on a video in a Public post, then the creator of the video could potentially see it! (You can decide whether that’s a good or bad thing…)

You are encouraged to watch the videos chosen by peers, read their commentaries, and respond to their posts to engage with both their ideas and your own reactions to the videos.

There are many places where you might find relevant video essays to watch and comment on. Some particularly useful sites include:

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies

Audiovisualcy: An Online Forum for Videographic Film Studies

The Best Video Essays of 2016

Reddit’s /r/VideoEssay forum

A list of videographic works by female critics

Feel free to make suggestions for other useful resources in the comments and I’ll edit this list.