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“Making videos becomes a way for someone to make sense of what they experience.” That line, as said by Kevin B. Lee  in his new collaborative video essay with  Chloé Galibert-Laîné , pretty much sums up the motivation behind every Video Essayist. It's the spur behind every idea for a montage, mashup or academic act of image prodding that results in a video essay. In Lee and Galibert-Laîné's new video essay "Reading // Binging // Benning" (commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam ), the pair employ the desktop documentary genre that Lee made popular with his sensational Transformers: The Premake to make a case on how to present a film neither of them have seen -- Readers by James Benning -- to a crowd of people (i.e. an audience at IFFR). Watch their illuminating and perfectly paced video essay below. a

The  International Film Festival Rotterdam 2018 is in full swing and one of the films that's getting the most amount of buzz and academic analyzing is  Metahaven and Rob Schröder 's Possessed ( watch the trailer ), an essay film that explores the idea of "self" in the age of social media. Screen Daily did a really insightful interview with the filmmaking team behind Possessed but something really interesting just happened with a group of video essayists, in regards to the film, that can articulate what the film means in a way that's more powerful than a standard question and answer format. The programme Critics' Choice commissioned a group of essayists (including Catherine Grant , Scout Tafoya and Irina Trocan , among others, all going by the name of  Team Metaprocessed )   to dive into Possessed and assess what their impressions were, figure out what Possessed aimed to achieve and then render that into their own responsive essay film. T...