Film Studies in Motion: From audiovisual essay to academic research video

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Taking a sidebar on pacing, it should be noted that relative newcomer to the genre, Tony Zhou, deviates most distinctly from this principle with his voice-overs that spur quickly through comprehensible lines of commentary. This was aptly reflected upon in Kevin B. Lee’s Fandor video What Makes a Video Essay Great? in December 2014. Here, Lee sets Zhou apart, and conceptualizes his mode of deliverance as ‘hypernarration’ while subsequently questioning whether or not all subsequent video essayists should adapt this mode of communication (although acknowledging its general attractiveness, one could wonder about hypernarration’s suitability to a theoretically dense academic research essay). For Lee, Zhou’s hypernarration is not only about ‘fast vocal delivery and montage’, but also ‘assertive opinionating’ using ‘appealing conversational tone’ that creates a kind of ‘cognitive treadmill effect’ on its hooked viewers (around 2:16 in Lee’s video):

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