The Video Essay: A Background

The video essay is a short documentary film that's the equivalent of a research paper. This website explores the use of video essays as pedagogical, teaching tools. As well, it can be used as a guide to create low-budget personal video essays and stories.

This video essay website was created to help those looking for an alternative to assigning a research paper or oral presentation. In-lieu of the term paper, the site can guide you and your students through making a short video/film. It shows you how to assign a 12-20 hour assignment (time includes classroom and outside of the classroom) or a year long project.

You will be able to learn how to develop a storyline in easy steps (from research, story development, video production, editing to an eventual presentation). We have provided this guide to allow the video to be shot on a smartphone and edited with links to free online software. We believe the storyteller’s use of this pedagogical tool, and supplemental storyboarding resources, can enhance the classroom engagement at all levels of learning.

To start, click anywhere in the menu above; we suggest you take a look at the How to Use this Website, the Homepage video carousel, the Examples page, or the Where to Start page.

A Note from the Filmmaker, Cecily Tyler

The inspiration for this work came to me while working in the film industry for 20+ years. I discovered and witnessed the magic and power in storytelling for which I saw time and time again while teaching, producing, directing, and consulting.

In 2016, I returned to school to get a Masters in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to take a step back and redefine the traditional paradigms of storytelling. The work that Dr. Jorrit de Jong and I created can be seen here [LINK TO NEW ASH CENTER WEBSITE]. Since then, the video essay has been adapted to be used internationally in numerous classrooms (from higher education to high school), by nonprofits, government entities, and individuals.

For approximately 90 years now, we have predominantly been reliant on ‘The Media’ to tell our stories broadly.

However with the dawn of Youtube, Vimeo and many others, we can now find channels of distribution for our work nationally or internationally, for free. Traditional network and feature-length storytelling formats--while they still are relevant for audiences--are no longer the only format to tell stories. The options for video-formatted storytelling have been blown open yielding extraordinary, new, innovative creativity!

While attending HKS as a student and working there as a fellow, my primary goals were to

Help people find integrity in personal storytelling
Help develop a framework to research and collect information in integrity
To offer the basics of storytelling 101
To share with other how the barriers to access filmmaking equipment have been dramatically reduced
To help people consider multiple new ways to tell stories
To help generate a new supplement form of data

If we seek to tell stories that aspire to solve our challenges, the solutions will eventually come, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. But if we continue to try in earnest, the answers will come; so will the stories.

This website was created to help you integrate video technology into a learning environment and to build media capacity in smaller organizations in a period of growth where you may not want to afford a large budget required when hiring a film production team. It is designed so you can read through it in a linear manner from left to right in the menu bar. You can also click on links and absorb bits and pieces as you choose.

If there is something missing from this site, please let us know. You can contact Cecily Tyler at cecilyt@docutribe.org

Currently our site focuses on integrating video and media creation in higher education classrooms for which are teaching subjects other than film. Our video essay team is also working to better accommodate and support anyone who considers themselves an educator or a student.

The website seeks to help democratize filmmaking. It seeks to support effective storytelling that helps individuals and communities rise, become nourished and grow fruitfully. We hope you use your skills in storytelling to cultivate hope, neither despair nor fear.

Storytelling via filmmaking for so long has had incredibly high barriers to access—the costs, the training, the time, the distribution model. Nowadays these barriers are lowering, and in some cases are free. It is becoming more and more possible for many more of us to create our own stories on video and via new forms of technology, in multiple formats. We can find the equipment at cheaper rates (like a smartphone versus something like a high definition-8K camera), we can learn to deepen our own art of storytelling with free online resources, (like this one), we can distribute our stories more freely via YouTube, Vimeo and more.

These realities are shifting the paradigm of storytelling. We are democratizing filmmaking.

No longer do experts need to rely on “the media” to share their stories. Nowadays we can bring storytelling skills to experts. And when I say experts, I mean the experts of a singular, personal on-the-ground experience; the expert of a specific skill, a field of study, an invention, a problem-solved; an expert in creating a community reunited or a new community entirely. We all have expertise. Storytelling helps us discover them, to foster and share them.

We want this site to be as accessible as possible to all. Therefore, it is open sourced globally.*

Through practicing the art of storytelling—alone quietly or with many—we never again need to marginalize our potential to discover, grow and share. We can own our voice, our growth and our skills. We can now use the latest tools in video and technology to do so at the hyper local-community level or globally.

That is the magic and power of storytelling.

Happy 2021! May it be bold and bright, adventurous and peaceful. May we all take part in fiercely helping our communities to heal from the challenges we faced throughout 2020.

Cheers to your next chapter,

Cecily Tyler

* While we appreciate accreditation, we are more interested in hearing from you about how we can make the site better, more effective. And, more so, we would love to hear from you about your successes and additional needs when using the tools and teachings offered on our site. Please feel free to contact Cecily at cecilytyler [at] gmail.com