@Just_Walli#28868
it‘s a short film from 2001, “She Puppet” by Peggy Ahwesh. she’s an experimental filmmaker, i think she does mostly exhibition work but there's samples of all kinds of weird stuff on her vimeo (had to go somewhere else to find She Puppet in full). i read about it in an article in Found Footage Magazine about machinima. the other film mentioned in the article, “Counter-Charge” by Alex Hovet, is also extremely good:
https://vimeo.com/145794196
I think I mentioned him before, I'm not sure – but this recent Karl Jobst look at Super Mario Bros speedruns is quite good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G8x-KiBLfw
I’m not typically a fan of the long-form video essay format (it’s why my interest in the new Action Button series tapered off once I realized they were all going to be 3+ hour hyper-maximalist marathons - maybe controversial opinion but I felt Tim’s 15-75 minute Kotaku videos were his sweet spot), especially when it’s mostly just narration-driven with images and music as afterthoughts - which is what most long-form video essays on Youtube tend to be. I find shorter running times typically encourage Youtube video people (I refuse to say “Youtubers”) to be punchier and more precise in their rhetoric and to make more comprehensive use of the video medium. Like, has anyone working in this format yet topped “Every Frame a Painting”? Tony Zhou deeply understands filmic language and knew how to make Youtube sing.
Anyway, here is the always-Sahara-dry Peter Bogdanovich describing his daddy Orson Welles’ _F for Fake_ (one of the progenitors of the genre - I assume it hasn’t been mentioned ITT because that’s just common knowledge) as a kind of video... _essay_, if you will:
https://youtu.be/Rur4wPupBCg
(_F for Fake_ is streaming on HBO Max!)
I also recently watched Terence Davies’ [_Of Time and the City_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Time_and_the_City), which I thought was very good - it made me feel bittersweet nostalgia for a time and place (1960s Liverpool) that I’ll never experience.
I remember thinking Chris Marker’s _Sans Soleil_ was unbearably pretentious when I saw it in college, but I should probably revisit it at some point.
Appreciate the links to pre-Youtube examples (on Youtube) ITT - more of those, please!
@Syzygy#20945 I've watched a lot of stuff like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQoVoX4F-AQ
@Thanatos#29541 There are plenty of people making sprawling, talky Youtube vids who took classes in film (or game, or whatever) studies; what made Zhou special is the catchy succinctness with which he explained fairly abstract and advanced film theory concepts (he typically said more of substance in under 10 minutes than most Youtube commentators manage in multiple hours), and that he did so using tightly edited, illustrative visuals as much or more than simple lecture-like narration.
@Just_Walli#28864 The Digital Foundry parody at the end of Nerrel's review of Control legit made me spit out my drink
https://youtu.be/PKhaX7Loy5M
@GigaSlime#29679 nerrel’s sense of humor destroys me
I thought this was a pretty neat Daria-through-the-lens-of-post-Clintonism-&-tiny-apocalypses take:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shSLPcp4C18
@Syzygy#20945 actually I wanna add that I've never seen a video like this starring a white dude that is absolutely ripped– usually the ones I watch are of bad ass moms catching a grip of eels to feed her wolf puppies type of mood.
A new one by Karl Jobst, covering some recent bollocks from Billy Mitchell and Todd Rodgers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aBXpBIfmW8
New Summoning Salt:
https://youtu.be/7rIJNT7dCmE
New GST Channel:
https://youtu.be/D15SmSa2PjA
https://youtu.be/AhNphleJzUk
This is awesome
mainly cause I already love all these games, but didn't read into it this way. Off the top, Pokemon Snap and Harvest Moon are awesome examples :j
Also this sorry
https://youtu.be/IT6-5ZbabVg
@“kory”#p20464 i think you would like ResonantArc, if you do not know about them already. They mainly focus on the storytelling aspects of video games but they talk about development too. They are big fans of Sakaguchi’s philosophy on storytelling. Most of their audience are JRPG fans, so they mostly talk about JRPGs though they really do like The Witcher series (including the novels) and the Mass Effect series… also iirc they got Yasunori Mitsuda to play a part of their introduction music!!
In their more recent series, they did a podcast on FFVIII which made me Really Really appreciate the game much more (linking their podcast video as i am more of a fan of the podcasts than the essay videos though their essay videos are great too!)
https://youtu.be/nPRzUtRDeLE
@“X3N0Sbioz”#p37178 Thank you! I have watched and enjoyed some of their videos in the past, but I did not know about the Mitsuda contribution! I was also not familiar with the podcast, will give this a listen.
I am a big fan of the Folding Ideas channel, probably my favourite “video essayist” on YT. They cover a broad range of topics, with a lot of good stuff about movies and cinematography but also politics, philosophy and plenty of games related topics too. I think they are very well structured, funny in places and I also really just like the delivery.
The most successful video on the channel is one about why the editing is bad Suicide Squad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDclQowcE9I
This video ostensibly about flat earth and conspiracy theorists is one of my favourites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
And for something a bit more relevant to the forum, this one about the way Fortnite is structured to pressure free players into putting money into the game is really eye-opening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
@“fridgeboy”#p37218 This specific question keeps me up at night
EDIT Which is to say I'm going to gobble gobble gobble this up, thank you
i‘m on a bit of a popular science kick at the moment, here are some video essays i’ve enjoyed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-_VPRCtiUg
this is about how, under certain conditions, things naturally tend to synchronise in nature, from two clocks hanging from the same piece of wood, to the planets in our solar system. i find the phenomenon trippy as hell, specially if you extrapolate it to the undercurrents of how society and human communication work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA
not exactly an essay, but in 2019, as part of their premium subscription service, Youtube gave a bunch of money to the guy from Vsauce to make a TV-quality program and he basically spent it on recreating famous studies and theorems, with extremely entertaining and variously enlightening results. this here is an attempt to see how the trolley problem would play out in real life. the audacity!