VIDEO ESSAYS GUIDE
Introductory Guide To Video Essays
About The Video Essays Guide
About Estrella Sendra

Estrella Sendra is a scholar, teacher, filmmaker, journalist and festival organiser, currently working as Senior Teaching Fellow in Film and Screen Studies at SOAS, University of London; and as Teaching Fellow in Global Media Industries, at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She engages with creative and innovative teaching methods, informed by her research and practical experience in the creative industries. Her research interests include festival studies, film festivals, global screen media, African cinema, audiovisual representations of migration, transnational communities, cultural contributions from rooted cosmopolitans, and gender. Since 2011, when she directed Témoignages de l’autre côté / Testimonials from the other side (2011), an awarded documentary film about migration, she has been developing a regional expertise in Senegal, with regular research periods in the country. In 2018, she completed her PhD in African Languages and Cultures at SOAS. This traces, for the first time, the history of festivalisation in Senegal, and focused on a music festival in a rural region, the Festival International de Folklore et de Percussion (FESFOP) in Louga. Her publications include ‘Displacement and the Quest for Identity in Alain Gomis’ Cinema’ in Black Camera: an International Film Journal (2018). She was the director of the Cambridge African Film Festival in 2014, and 2015, as well as part of the curatorial team until 2019, and has been involved in further festivals in Spain, Senegal, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
About Bartolomeo Meletti

Bartolomeo Meletti is the Education and Research Executive of Learning on Screen, a membership organisation specialised in the use of moving image and sound in education. He also works as Creative Director for CREATe, the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre at the University of Glasgow. In this capacity, he has led the development of CopyrightUser.org, an independent online platform intended to make UK copyright law accessible to everyone. Bartolomeo is also the Director of Worth Knowing Production, a digital creative team specialised in making complex knowledge accessible to everyone through research-based visual tools.
Previously, Bartolomeo worked at the British Film Institute and the Digital Catapult on secondment from CREATe, and held research and media production positions at CIPPM, the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (Bournemouth University), where he is currently a Visiting Fellow; and at CEMP, the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (Bournemouth University).
In 2015, and alongside Professor Ronan Deazley, Bartolomeo received the Arts and Humanities Research Councils (AHRC) Award for Innovation in Film. This was for their work 'The Adventure of the Girl with the Light Blue Hair', the first episode in 'The Game is On!' webseries.
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- Becker, C. and Copple Smith, E (eds). ‘Teaching Dossier: The Video Essay Assignment’, Cinema Journal: The Journal for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 2, Spring/Summer 2013: http://www.teachingmedia.org/the-video essay-assignment-cinema-journal-teaching-dossier-vol-12/
- Butler, J. et al. (2015). ‘Teaching with Video in the 21st Century: Clips, Essays, Full Length Films and TV Programs.’ Workshop at the Society from Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Montreal, March 2015. In The Audiovisual Essay. Available online [03.08.20]: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/resources/how-to-guides/teaching-with-video/
- Callahan, Vick and Kuhn, Virgin (2016). ‘Introduction to Issue 11: The Video Essay: An Emergent Taxonomy of Cinematic Writing.’ In The Cine-Files, Issue 11, Fall 2016. Available online [03.07.2019]: http://www.thecine-files.com/introduction-issue11/
- Cox-Stanton, Tracy and de Free, Allison (2020). 'Special Issue on the Scholarly Video Essay: What makes a Video Essay Scholarly?'. In The Cine-Files, Issue 15 (Fall 2020). Available online: http://www.thecine-files.com/what-makes-a-video-essay-scholarly/
- Cox-Stanton (2014). ‘Welcome to Issue 7, ‘The Video Essay: Parameters, Practice, Pedagogy.’ In The Cine-Files, issue 7, fall 2014 [05.09.2019]: http://www.thecine-files.com/issue7introduction/
- Crofts, Charlotte & Nevill, Alexander (2018). 'Publishing screen media practice research: evolving processes of contextualisation, peer review and future proofing in Screenworks.' In Media Practice and Education, 19(3): 283-297.
- Diélcio Moreira, Benedito and Pinto de Oliveira, Pedro (2019). ‘New ways of Communicating Science: The Audiovisual Scientific Essay Experience.’ InTecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Videoessays, 2, July 2019. Available online (29.07.19): https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/en/journal-2-4/
- Dovey, Lindiwe (2020). ‘On Teaching and Being Taugh: Reflections on Decolonising Pedagogy.’ In PARSE-Intersections, (11). Available online (29.06.20): https://parsejournal.com/article/on-teaching-and-being-taught/
- Dovey, Lindiwe and Awachie, Ifeanyi (2019). Decolonising pedagogy video. Produced by Chouette Films. September 2019. Accessed (3.07.20): https://screenworlds.org/resources/decolonising-pedagogy/
- Fyfe, Greer and Ross, Miriam (2015). ‘How-to Video Essays’. The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, February 2015. In The Audiovisual Project website. Available online (03.08.20): https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/resources/how-to-guides/how-to-video-essays-by-greer-fyfe-and-miriam-ross/
- Garwood, Ian (2016). ‘The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticsm.’ In NECSUS, Autumn 2016. Available online (03.07.20): https://necsus-ejms.org/the-place-of-voiceover-in-audiovisual-film-and-television-criticism/
- Glisovic, Smiljana, Berkeley, Leo & Batty, Craig (2016. 'The problem of peer review in screen production: exploring issues and proposing solutions.' In Studies in Australasian Cinema, 10(1): 5-19.
- Grant, Catherine (2016). ‘The audiovisual essay as performative research.’ NECSUS: Available online (07.09.19): https://necsus-ejms.org/the-audiovisual-essay-as-performative-research/ (2014). ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking.’ In aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 1(1): 49-62.
- Grant, Catherine and Kooijman, Jaap (2019). ‘New Ways of seeing (and hearing): The audiovisual essay and television.’ In NECSUS – European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2019. Available online [03.07.2019]: https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television/
- hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.
- Keathley, Christian (2014). ‘Teaching Videographic Film Studies.’ In The Cine-Files, issue 7, fall 2014. Available online (06.10.2019): http://www.thecine-files.com/keathley/ (2012). ‘Teaching the Scholarly Video.’ In Frames Cinema Journal, 1(1). Available online [06.10.2019]: http://framescinemajournal.com/article/teaching-the-scholarly-video/
- Mcwirther, Andrew (2015). ‘Film criticism, film scholarship and the video essay’. In Screen, 56(3): 369-377. Available online [02.07.20]: https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/56/3/369/1860953?redirectedFrom=fulltext
- Mistry, Jyoti, and Sakota, Tanja (2017). ‘Filmmaking as research: Pedagogy and practice.’ Journal of African Cinemas, 9 (2-3): 113-118.
- Mulvey, Laura (2006). Death 24x a second: Stillness and the moving image. London: Reaktion Books.
- Myers, Andrew (2012). ‘Click Here to Print This Video Essay: Observations on Open Access and Non-Traditional Format in Digital Cinema and Media Studies Publishing.’ In Special Issue ‘Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?’ Frames Cinema Journal, 1. Accessed (02.09.2019): http://framescinemajournal.com/article/click-here-to-print-this-video essay/
- Rascaroli, Laura (2017). ‘Framing: Looking for an Object, or The Essay Film as Theoretical Practice.’ In How the Essay Film Thinks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 165-186
- Sendra, Estrella (2020). ‘Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research’. In Damásio, M. J. & Mistry, J. (eds.) (2020) International Journal of Film and Media Arts GEECT, Special Issue Mapping Artistic Research in Film, 5(2): 65-81. Available online (13.11.20) here.
- SOAS Podcasts (2020). ‘Video Essays as a Creative Method of Assessment’. School of Arts SOAS Podcasts Series, 2. Available online (27.05.20): https://soundcloud.com/soas-university-of-london/videoessays?fbclid=IwAR3wNehcivYJF5k8lXCiBpN8UNKKOkds3YGY_S9uWm03Pgv-iu9PtWGNYeI
- Solomon, Matthew (2019). ‘Audiovisual Pedagogies. Introduction: the inexhaustible text’. Screen, 60(3): 449-454. Available online (29.10.20): https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/60/3/449/5571246?redirectedFrom=fulltext
- van den Berg, Thomas, and Kiss, Miklós (2016). Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video. Available online (07.07.2020): https://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-motion/index
- Witt, Michael (2017). ‘Taking stock: Two decades of teaching the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticism.’ In NECSUS, Spring 2017. Available online (29.10.20): https://necsus-ejms.org/taking-stock-two-decades-of-teaching-the-history-theory-and-practice-of-audiovisual-film-criticism/
How to contribute to this guide
We welcome any feedback you may have on this guide, as well as further contributions to make it as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Please get in touch with:
- Bartolomeo Meletti: bart@learningonscreen.ac.uk
- Estrella Sendra: Estrella.sendra@kcl.ac.uk· www.estrellasendra.com