Podcast

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Check Out These Awesome Writing Videos


Once upon a time when my book was coming out, I planned on having a new podcast episode every other week and a new video on the alternate weeks. But now it’s been a year and a half and I’ve only done five podcast episodes and four videos. Multimedia is hard! It’s so much easier to just spit out a few words 3-5 times a week (with some weeks off, of course).

When I started making my videos two years ago, I first watched all the film-clip-based writing videos I could find to understand the genre. But this week I saw a link to a Black Panther video from a series I wasn’t familiar with, because it’s only about two years old: The “Just Write” videos by Sage Hyden (who has an adorably thick Canadian accent.)

And these videos are awesome. Soon I had devoured every one. This is now my favorite example of the genre, certainly far exceeding my own. He has a good mix of negative videos and positive videos. The former are more fun (three videos attacking the Last Airbender movie and five attacking the Hobbit movies) but the latter are more useful. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

The video that led me to the channel is actually one of the few I disagree with. I loved The Black Panther overall, but I think that the greatness of Killmonger as a villain has been overstated. Hyden says that he solves all the previous problems with Marvel villains, but I think he still has a familiar one: an overcomplicated plan. This post by Brian Cronin is an attempt to defend the movie against this criticism, but I think he twists until he hangs himself. Ultimately, there isn’t a good explanation for why Killmonger was working for Klaw.


I particularly liked this video, which isn’t really about Wonder Woman, but is more about bathos (specifically in the Marvel movies), which is a tricky concept I’ve never covered. Again, I don’t entirely agree with him (I preferred Dr. Strange to Wonder Woman) but what he says is very smart and useful.


I’ve been wanting to say something for a while about the overuse of MacGuffins, but never formulated it right. This video nails everything I wanted to say.


Here’s a great one on right wing narratives in traditionally animated movies vs. progressive narratives in computer animated movies.

But really you should check them all out.  They’re great. 

4 comments:

Neil said...

I love that channel! Some other good channels are Like Stories of Old, Lindsay Ellis, Lessons from the Screenplay, Now You See It, and Folding Ideas. After Every Frame a Painting left, I needed to fill the hole he left, lol.

Matt Bird said...

I thought there was some connection between Every Frame a Painting and Now You See It?

Neil said...

Is there? I never noticed if that was the case. Awesome.

Matt Bird said...

I just tried to look it up and it seems not. One started as the other ended and I somehow convinced myself that the latter was just a rebranding of the former.