By your students you´ll be taught. Leigh Singer graduated with a First Class degree from the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick where I taught him many moons ago. He is now a freelance film journalist and celebrated video essayist who has contributed to Sight and Sound, Little White Lies, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Empire, Total Film, BBCi, Dazed & Confused, Indiewire, IGN.com, RogerEbert.com and many other publications and outlets. Leigh is also a filmmaker and screenwriter and a programme advisor for the London Film Festival. He also teaches a module on video essays at the National Film and Television School and regularly crops in the year-end lists of best video essays (2019, 2018).

 

The podcast above is an edited version of the talk on video essays Leigh gave recently at Warwick followed by a discussion with students where they ask questions related to the their own work. I have kept them in because I think the questions and the discussion might be helpful to others. Rather than create dissolves between the cuts, or create a more elegant ellipsis, I have decided to leave a very short but evident silence to indicate the gaps which occurred when Leigh was showing examples from his own work. The video essays discussed are available to see below, in chronological order.

 

 

 

 

 

Readers/ Listeners/ Viewers might also be interested in some of Leigh´s mojre recent work so I have included two examples below, one from Little White Lies:

Psycho vs Psycho – Hitchcock’s classic vs Gus Van Sant’s remake: 

 

Psycho vs Psycho – Hitchcock’s classic vs Gus Van Sant’s remake

 

and also another he created for Sight and Sound,

Gotta film dance! The evolution of the movie musical – a video essay

 

This is the third of a series of talks with video essay practitioners on their work, the other two being with Catherine Grant and John Gibbs.

José Arroyo