The Essay Library

The Essay Library is a Discord server for video essay creators and viewers to chat about all things video essays. It's also the official server of r/videoessay. Click here to join The Essay Library on Discord. Links:
The Essay Library YouTube Channel
Beginner's Guide to Discord (from Discord Support)
r/videoessay subredditAccolades:
The Exquisite Relay: An Essay Library Co-Construction was praised as a "fascinating experiment in essay structure" in "The best video essays of 2022" (Sight and Sound).The Essay Library Anthology Vols. 2 + 3 received a special mention from the curators of "The best video essays of 2021" (Sight and Sound).The Essay Library Anthology
Compilations of 60-second micro-essays around a given theme.
Volume 1 | "Beginnings" (2021)
Volume 2 | "Time" (2021)
Volume 3 | "Death" (2021)
Volume 4 | "We Asked A Bot To Name 18 Video Essays" (2022)
Volume 5 | "Secrets" (2023)Other Collaborations
"Tales from the Essay Library: Rom-Com" - creating video essays based on each other's romantic comedy film recommendations. Coming soon!"The Exquisite Relay: An Essay Library Co-Construction" - a videographic twist on the exquisite corpse featuring two video essays made one minute at a time. The first video was made forward, the second backward. Each creator had four days to do their part before passing it on to the next person. Mentioned in Sight and Sound."Tales from the Essay Library: Horror" - eight video essayists created work based on each other's horror movie recommendations. This essay chain had a time constraint of 5 minutes per essay.The best way to get in touch with the Essay Library moderation team is by joining the Discord server, but you can also contact us using the form below.

Every week, one member of the server is chosen at random to choose a video essay for others to watch. In doing this, we can learn how to improve our own videos. With its wide range of selections, this has prompted us to interrogate what defines a video essay. Are all of these works even video essays? The #essay-of-the-week channel is home to these discussions.Essays are chosen by different members in order to get a diversity of ideas. The videos below do not necessarily reflect the views of the mod team.