Back in November, I started working on what I thought would be a quick video on a fairly narrow topic. I planned on getting it out in early December, before my Die Hard video. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
The research ballooned into a hundred years of cinema history, and included many books, articles, and behind-the-scenes videos. I finally completed the script Friday, and recorded the voice over yesterday. It’s easily the longest video essay I’ve done.
Despite all that progress, I don’t want to make any promises as to when the final video will be posted, other than “soon.” If you want to be notified as soon as it goes live, don’t forget to subscribe!
I have at least (mostly) kept up with my other Substack,
. TMFS readers might be interested in this post, which talks a little bit about the narrative term “intercalation.”Actually Complete Video Essays
During this time, I have, of course, continued to watch other videos essays that, unlike me, their authors actually finished. It’s not market competition research or anything; I genuinely enjoy them. Usually. Some I greatly dislike. Examples of both below—
Writing Advice
Andrew B. Ashford is the kind of writing professor I wish I had in school. Yes, he looks like a bit of a geek, but that’s at least 50% schtick.1
His latest video is self-demonstrating advice about writing “vomit drafts”.
This video from Mike Hill isn’t exactly a video “essay,” but it’s in the same spirit, and I really like what he has to say about Jurassic World. Mainly that it stinks.
Competing Essayists
Speaking of Jurassic World, Ryan George has started doing Pitch Meeting retrospectives, where he discusses how and why he made previous pitches meeting.
This one was particularly relevant to my situation, in that he talks about taking hours of extra time to create what amounted to only a few seconds of finished video. He used to put out one of these a week; I don’t know how he did it.
George has a particular format to his videos, so he’s not making exactly the kind of videos I’m trying to create, anyway. On the other end of the spectrum is Will Jordan, the Critical Drinker.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, his “video” essays are hot garbage. They’re not even video essays, properly understood. It’s just this guy talking over random footage from the movie in question, which may or may not actually be relevant to what he’s saying at any given moment. Half the time, it looks like he’s just playing the movie’s trailer on a loop.
But what really got my goat was the thumbnail to this recent video—
The movies pictured are, from left to right, The Rock, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Die Hard. The only one of these three that’s a genuine sequel is Fury Road, and it’s just about the farthest thing imaginable from “underrated.”2
Die Hard is based on a book, Nothing Lasts Forever, which is a sequel to another book, The Detective, which was itself adapted into a movie of the same name, 20 years earlier. That’s an interesting bit of trivia, but I’m sorry, you can’t six-degrees-of-separation your way into calling the latter movie a sequel to the former.
And The Rock is only a sequel if you consider it to be a part of the Sean Connery series of Bond films. Which, it turns out, makes for a pretty great video essay—
Circling back to Critical Drinker’s video, one other thing bugs me about the thumbnail: none of those movies are the “five underrated sequels.”3 It’s not fraud or anything, but it’s a very misleading thumbnail all around.
Of course, his channel is much more popular than mine. Maybe he knows something I don’t. Should I be making dishonest thumbnails for my videos?
Speaking of Dishonesty…
This video made it to the top of r/movies not too long ago—
Now, I don’t want to accuse Nerdwriter of plagiarism, but this video is skirting right up to the line. The video was clearly inspired by an old David Bordwell article right down almost all the same film examples.
I’ve referenced Bordwell many times,4 even crediting him for inspiring my video “Show, Don’t Tell” is Terribl(y Misunderstood) Advice—
Bordwell and his wife Kristin Thompson wrote the textbook most film schools use for their intro to cinema class. I'm pretty sure the above article was turned into a chapter of that book in a later edition. I'd be shocked if Nerdwriter isn't familiar with their work.
So Bordwell is well-known among film students and scholars, but Nerdwriter makes videos for a general audience. It’s really sad that a popular YouTuber will just lift material directly from an academic, and not even point his huge following towards the source. What do you think?
I think/hope.
Also, it doesn’t really require having seen the previous films, so even then calling it a sequel is a stretch.
If you’re curious, I’ll save you 11 minutes. The five movies in the video are:
Die Hard 2: Die Harder (terrible movie)
Rocky II (never saw, though I hear it’s good)
2010: The Year We Make Contact (actually ok, interesting choice)
Ghostbusters II (not good)
Predator 2 (fair, but why is this the finale of your video?)
A lot more often than I realized, actually