Exploring the Video Essay

Over the past decade a growing field of analytical videos has gained popularity on video‒sharing platforms like Youtube, which their creators call video essays. This diverse genre originates from the literary essay and can deal with a multitude of subjects. Like the literary essay, the video essay lives in the tenison between poetic and academic approaches.

This thesis characterises the development of the video essay and its common denominators as an online video genre. These findings are then used to evaluate which criteria a video essay has to meet in order to be recognized as such. These are used to create a video essay on the topic of the portrayal of gender in children’s films and tv shows. The entire process of production from choosing a topic to the final product is documented.