Transforming “academic” texts into creative video essays by Mike Mena

Abstract: This is a multimodal publication that details the pedagogical process of producing a creative video essay. In what follows are two resources. The first resource is the video itself, which has three goals: 1) illustrate the difference between the “video lecture” and the “video essay”; 2) offer three guiding pedagogical principles that will aide the script writing process; and, 3) provide a walk-thru annotated version of a previously published creative video essay. The second resource is the video script used in the making of this video. Taken together this multimodal publication employs the video essay genre to guide readers/viewers through the process of creating their own “video essays.”

Note to reader :

I write scripts designed to be delivered verbally. For example, in the provided script, I use commas to signal pauses, not grammatically standardized sentences. This script is also filled with formal and informal contractions (don’t vs do not; gonna vs going to). Accordingly, the script functions to signal performative aspects of the video.

Script :

Hello everybody, Mike Mena here bringing to you a video essay on how to create a video essay. [pause] Like the video title says, we are looking at how to transform an “academic” text into a creative video essay. By academic text, I mean like a peer-reviewed article, or chapter of a book, or whatever your little heart desires. This video has three goals. First, we compare and contrast two genres of videos, the “standard lecture video,” and what could be called a “creative video essay”. Second, I’m going to provide my three guiding principles to getting complex material across to a general audience. And, finally, I’m going to walk you through one of my previous creative video essays.

Okay, let’s talk video genres, cuz before we talk about what a creative video essay is, we gotta understand how a video lecture is generally structured. Alotta times it is based on the structure of an in-person classroom lecture, but without any students there. Usually, in-person class lectures take a text written using a specialized language, and translating it into a spoken version of the text while staying within the parameters of that same specialized language, maybe reworded for a bit more simplicity. We expect people get to class having done some homework, and we, as the educators, clarify stuff. This is exactly what we are not doing with a creative video essay, we are NOT summarizing or reviewing the main ideas. We’ll come back to that, but let’s think about what a video essay is.

I would say a creative video essay is far more related to what a creative written essay. For example, it has An introduction with a thesis, a couple body paragraphs, closing thoughts. And, importantly, everything you need to know is in the essay. On the other hand, with class lectures a lotta times we pick up from the last lecture we delivered, so we presume there is knowledge to be built upon. We also assume the audience already did some homework for us. A creative visual essay, does not assume homework has been done in preparation. So, guiding principle number one for creating video essays: “The audience has not done any homework.” In other words, assume they know absolutely nothing about the material you are presenting.

I know that might sound weird, but stick with me. The goal is to produce videos that students watch before they read the original text. This primes your students to read in a certain way, the video essay kinda points them toward places you the educator find valuable.

Now, if we think of ourselves as video essayists, the idea of an “essay” kinda suggests this is more creative than formal, because you write essays for a more general readership. However, let’s not mistake creativity with simplification. What I try to do is capture the depth of an academic text and go even deeper where the text itself cannot, cuz I have an advantage, I can have pictures on the screen, animations, graphics, quotes, sound effects, etc. In that sense, I am absolutely against the idea that translating academic material into video means something will be “lost in translation.”

This brings us to our first potential set of difficulties. How do I make specialized knowledge accessible without using the specialized language of my field? This is where a creative mindset is required. If you walk in with the idea that “there is no way to explain X without using the word Y,” then you probably won’t get too far. I’m here to tell you, it’s possible. I do it in every single video. It took a really long time to figure out what language to change, what language to focus on, and then narrow down what actually works. Today, I’m just gonna tell you how to do it by constantly referring to a metaphor I think is useful. I’ll be using this metaphor throughout the video.

I think of my video essays, not as translation, but as musical transposition, or changing the key of a song. We will be using this as our central metaphor. (TERM ON SCREEN) This is what I mean: Have you ever heard someone at a karaoke bar sing something that is way too high in pitch, they simply cannot reach those notes, they cannot reach those musical patterns, it’s out of reach? Now, sometimes karaoke bars have the same song in two musical keys, generally one key for men and one key for women, the assumption being lower and higher pitched voices, all the musical patterns are the same it’s just adjusted for equal but differing capabilities, for lower or higher pitched voices. It’s the same song, but in a different musical key. The best singers in the world know what musical keys they specialize in and stay a million miles away from the ones they are bad at. We can think of each of our discipline-specific, specialized language as that musical key we are trained to sing in, where we’re trained to communicate our ideas.

Let’s keep going with this metaphor. As an educator or academic that uses a specialized language, could you take your own work and explain it to, for example, phds from an entirely different field who use an entirely different specialized language? Keep in mind, they all have phds, right? Equal but differing capabilities. But, they specialize at singing in a totally different musical key than you. Do you think you could change the key of your research material for them? This is what I mean by transposing material for equal but differing capabilities, we don’t need to simplify, we need to transpose. For videos, we must imagine our audience is just as smart as us, because if we don’t, we are off to a very bad start.

Transposition, then, is where we must focus all our creative energy. Luckily, we already have the major language skills. You know your specialized language, BUT you also know how to speak in non-specialized language. The new skill is figuring out how to transpose from A to B. Generally, we might think that as the teacher, you are bringing students over into your specialized language. But let’s stay true to the musical metaphor, a music teacher who has a low-pitched voice would never try to force a student with a high voice to sing using only low musical notes, or force them to sing in a range their voice cannot reach. The music teacher transposes all their musical knowledge into the student’s abilities, and trains the student to use their voice. That means, as the music teacher, I have to teach myself to sing with my student, not the other way around. In a sense, we have to train ourselves to relearn our own specialized knowledge in a different musical key.

This is why I say that I transpose academic material into a different key, I don’t translate material in a “downward” direction, or dumb things down, or assume information will be “lost in translation.” I have learned over the last few years that my audience likes to sing in a certain key, so I come to them, I taught myself to sing with them as oppose to trying to force them to sing with me.

Selecting a text for transposition

Let’s get into some practical advise for transposing a text. The most common question I get is: What text should I pick to transpose? The first question you gotta ask yourself is “who is my audience?” For now, let’s pretend we’re making videos for a specific class we are teaching. As a general rule, I always recommend you start making videos with texts you are very comfortable with, the ones that are deeply interesting to you and that you could talk about all day. And script out your videos. All my videos are 100% scripted.

Then, after you select material, there is the question of how much should I cover? How many examples? How long should a video be? The last question is easy. The video should be as long as it needs to be, but the shorter the better, I usually do between 10-20 minutes.

Next question: what do I cover? And how much? Let’s pretend we are starting with a text we love, one of your go-to favorite articles. To begin, limit yourself to one article or one chapter, JUST ONE. And from that one text I focus on one keyword, JUST ONE. But, realistically, a lot of times I need to cover two keywords, but this is my absolute limit. So, my second guiding principle is: One keyword per video. Maaaaybe two. The key is to go as deep as you can into those one or two concepts. We absolutely do not want to make a video overview. Overviews tend to summarize, and our goal is depth and creativity. Now, alotta times we are reading stuff that has about 5 or 6 important pieces of jargon, or keywords. The hardest part is choosing the main one or two. Usually there is that one central keyword that is easy to pick, but there are usually several secondary keywords. Let’s get into a specific example.

Let’s say there are FIVE keywords in the text I chose to transpose. To increase the odds of them really learning all those keywords, I want to do the heavy lifting for the students. I want my students to walk away from my videos with at least the ONE main keyword in their back pocket, maybe TWO keywords in their back pocket, before they even pick up the original text. Because if the audience feels like they own at least one or two of the central concepts, all the side concepts tend to fall into place. Mainly because students don’t have to learn all the keywords at the same time, and for the first time. That gives students mental space for a far deeper comprehension overall. That is the goal of video essays, not presenting a summary or overview. We are going or depth.

Video Essay Body Paragraph: An annotated video breakdown

Next, I’m gonna breakdown an example of one of my own videos. I wanted to cover a famous concept from the book “Black Feminist Thought,” by Patricia Hill Collins. The concept is called “controlling images”, which is similar to the idea of “racial stereotypes.” But, in order to adequately get that concept across I needed to talk about another keyword, the term “objectification.” Here’s the thing, in this chapter the word “objectification” is not presented as a keyword at all, it’s just a word used often. So, I had to pull on my expertise here and know that students always have trouble with the word “objectification.” There are many ways to talk about it, they’ve probably heard it in other classes, maybe in psychology, in economics, in anthropology. Objectification is a word that brings a lot of conceptual clutter, and I want to clear away the clutter to make more mental space. Another way to say this is that Objectification is a heavy, heavy word, and I need to lighten the load. As the educator I want to do the heavy lifting for my students. So, there are my two selections: the main keyword “controlling images,” and the keyword “objectification,” which I elevated to the status of a keyword because it's used so often. Remember, select only two keywords at the maximum.

While you watch the video, remember, I am always thinking of how to transpose material into language most people know, for equal but differing capabilities. Most people know what a racial stereotype is. Let’s circle back to the music metaphor, or the idea that the audience likes to sing in a particular key. Let’s pretend conversations about stereotypes is one musical key. And, the specialist conversation about controlling images is a different musical key. I’m going to try to transpose the song called “controlling images” into a musical key my audience likes to sing. In other words, I know my audience will feel comfortable using conversational language about stereotypes, so I’m gonna come to meet my audience on their home turf, constantly referring to how this relates to racial stereotypes. So even if people have absolutely no idea what “controlling images” are, or what “objectification” is, the audience might feel like they know something about the two keywords that isn’t really new, or that we are thinking of something related to racial stereotypes, but from a different perspective. We are making new material feel familiar.

Under the video essay will be some onscreen annotations to illustrate what I’m doing. Let’s watch.

WATCH VIDEO WITH ANNOTATIONS: https://youtu.be/tgChDZrQdgY

Ok, so in the video, I stuck to controlling images and objectification as my keywords. But to help me in the transposition process, I am constantly referring to stereotype, this is that common ground conversation, or the common language we share. I’m not meeting my audience halfway, I’m going all the way to them. This is the third pedagogical principle: Teach on your audience’s home turf. Here is what I mean…

As we’ve been talking about, we are transposing material into the audience’s non-disciplinary, non-specialist language, where they feel most at home, or their home turf. There are couple ways to make sure you actually get there. This goes back to the first guiding principle: Don’t assume the audience has done any homework. But, I suggest we go far beyond that. We also should add: Don’t assume your audience has had classes with you before and don’t assume you will have more classes to reteach the keywords in your video essay. Just assume you got one chance. If you keep that in your head, it almost forces you to drop any extra specialized language that could potentially give your audience problems, or clutter up the mental space of your students.

There is a major benefit to this approach: it means you can use the same video in future classes and drop it in at any point in the semester, because videos are not dependent on any specialized language or prior knowledge. (BTW, a pro-tip here: don’t include phrases like: “last week we read this…”, or “good luck on your final paper due on Friday,” or have a Christmas tree in background cuz what if you assign this video in a Spring semester. Because, if we are thinking long-term, we are making a library of video essays use and reuse many times. Which means maybe in future classes you’ll spend less time making powerpoints, or preparing lectures.

Closing thoughts

Ok, Let’s summarize the main strengths of the creative video essay.

FIRST, Video essays are different from a video lecture because they work autonomously, without the need for lectures before or after. That means you can use your videos over and over again across many semesters. You could even share videos with your colleagues or your department. So, the fact that video essays still work without being attached to a specific class is an absolute strength.

I think, the craziest part of transposing material is that it makes most academic texts accessible to, yes, other phds and graduate students and undergraduate students, but, also high school students. Because, here is the thing, high school students and people with phds use the same non-specialized language, the same non-discipline specific language. In other words, almost everyone knows how to sing in that musical key.

And, the last strength I’ll mention here is the push to be creative in your teaching. Make no mistake, it takes a massive degree of creativity to transpose material. But, remember, creativity has the potential to bring joy to teaching and learning. Let me ask you a very serious question: does making overview powerpoint presentations or slideshows bring you joy? Do they bring joy to your students?

Video essays are not too hard to make if you remember my the guiding principles: FIRST: your audience has not done any homework for you. SECOND: focus on just one or two keywords per video. Just one or two. We are not translating material “downward,” or simplifying—we are transposing. We are not making overviews or summarizing, we are aiming for depth. And, THIRD: meet your audience on their home turf, this means, teach yourself to sing with them, as opposed to forcing them to sing with you.

BTW, bonus points to you if you noticed that in this video essay, I followed the three guiding principles. I focused on one keyword: transposition. And, kept comparing video essays to classroom lectures, to make the new feel familiar. And, finally, the entire metaphor about learning how to sing with your students, was me transposing my pedagogical approach into a metaphor that you hopefully felt comfortable with. Because honestly this video could have easily utilized tons of big pedagogical keywords, with constant references to methodological terms and all that noise. So, this video was me trying to sing with you, that was me meeting you on your home turf. Hopefully I got there.

That’s all for today folks. You can visit me at MaestroMikeMena.com, Once again I’m Mike The social life of language youtube channel. And, we’re done.