As I hop into the video chat with Lindsay Ellis and Angelina Meehan, they are discussing the best way to handle a visual gag in their upcoming Game of Thrones video. It’s 8pm in my home, 3pm in Angelina’s, and noon in Lindsay’s. The video essayist team are accustomed to working across time-zone barriers, creating hours of media criticism for their Youtube channel, Lindsay Ellis, in this fashion.
Lindsay Ellis began her career in the mid-aughts. Working under the title of the “Nostalgia Chick”, she published video reviews of 80s and 90s movies in a format that combined the minute-by-minute gags of MST3K (Mystery Science Theatre 3,000) with some deeper critical insights. Eventually, Ellis moved on from this moniker to a self-titled channel, beginning a transitionary period in which she produced Loose Canon, a series of autopsies of the representations of fictional characters, real people, and events and how they have changed throughout history.
Ellis: Loose Canon was easy — it was very easy to write because it didn’t really require a thesis, it was basically a listicle. The growth of the channel was very small at the time, so it wasn’t really taking off, but at the time I was like “this is just to pay the bills.”
During this time, Ellis was developing her voice and moving towards the “video essay” format. Video essays, popularised in the early 2010s by creators such as Nerdwriter and Every Frame A Painting, distinguished themselves from earlier online media criticism with higher standards of writing and editing. Video content no longer needed to take the form of a vlog, a review, or a reaction piece, but could instead borrow from all of these genres to craft engaging, long-form think pieces.
This area of video content was, and still is, highly amorphous, with different creators taking wildly different approaches. We can see the first hints of Ellis’ video essayist voice in her piece on Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera. This 45-minute piece develops her old review format, still delving into the mistakes and flaws of the subject matter, but devoting extended time to the film’s production context and lengthy digressions on the theory behind the critiques. This 2016 video was also noteworthy as Ellis’ first collaboration with her future editor and co-writer Angelina Meehan.
Meehan: I’d been at a job I was really unhappy at, and Lindsay had been like “Hey, I can’t offer you anything permanent, but while you’re looking for other things would you like to help out?” And now it’s 2019.
The team’s collaborative process seems fairly freeform. They both start with an outline, and either can serve as “head writer” for a particular video, but both creators influence each other constantly.
Meehan: Someone will add in a revision or maybe add a scene, or a new perspective.
Their process also seems like a complete jumble of tasks and responsibilities shared between the creators. At time of interview, different parts of their next video need writing edits, voice-overs, and new video footage, many of these jobs ongoing in parallel with each other.
Ellis: We know that some people do it all at once, and we don’t. A lot of times we’ll record something and it’s only when it’s in the edit that we’ll realise we’re missing a piece.
The period following the Schumacher essay was one of extreme creative diversity for Ellis’ channel. As Angelina became a more significant part of the production cycle, serving as head writer for some episodes, long form essay content gradually became the channel’s bread and butter. This was partly influenced by how Youtube was changing as a platform.
Ellis: I kinda lucked out in that the trend in the Youtube algorithm eventually synced with what I was always doing/wanted to do. Eventually the algorithm started favouring longer content, so that just worked towards what I was already doing.
Ellis also points out that Meehan was fundamental to this change in direction.
Ellis: It kind of took on a life of its own once the two of us were working together. People really responded to it just because the content was better, because two heads are better than one. We brought our own strengths and tried out things that I never would have tried before.
The channel also began to engage more with politics, as in the essay on Rent which analysed the film adaptation’s failure to engage with the realities of New York’s AIDS epidemic, or the essay on Mel Brooks, which digs deep into the pitfalls of political satire, and how and why The Producers transcends them. In spite of its increasingly political angle, the content is still rooted in entertainment media criticism for the most part — although Ellis sees no reason why this should always be the case.
Ellis: I don’t like the idea of restricting your content. And that’s an issue with Youtube, that it can force you to stay in one vertical, and that doesn’t interest me. I try to use media to talk about sociological issues.
This period has yielded several critically acclaimed series including The Whole Plate — an introduction to every major branch of critical theory through Michael Bay’s Transformers movies — and PBS’s It’s Lit — a collection of primers on different literary subjects. By far the channel’s most ambitious project to date is the Hugo Award-nominated series on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movie trilogy. The series is divided into three parts, with each delving into a deeper layer of context on the much derided adaptation. Rather than sticking solely to film clips and commentary, the team travelled to New Zealand to gather original interview footage with locals and the cast. The creators say they were inspired to start the project when they learned about the conflict between the film’s producers and New Zealand film workers’ unions.
Meehan: We had joked about going to New Zealand. People were like “Oh, Lindsay, please talk about The Hobbit.” And usually when someone asks you to do something, or wants you to watch something, it’s so exhausting. You haven’t got the brain space to tackle what everyone wants from you.
Ellis: The labour issue was honestly the only reason we did it. It had not been covered at all in America. There was one guy writing for the Hollywood Reporter in 2010 who had kind of covered it while it was happening, but then it was gone and it was never mentioned again. On the whole I don’t like tackling over-discussed topics. Finding an angle that hasn’t been discussed is generally how we try to approach things.
It’s apt that the groundbreaking series has made history as the first video essay to be nominated for a Hugo Award, not only advancing its own format but applying a refreshingly critical and incisive scalpel to the science fiction/fantasy properties that the Hugo Awards aim to celebrate. Both women were shocked to have received the nomination.
Meehan: Since this video essay format is in an exploratory phase, to have recognition from the WorldCon team is kind of amazing. There’s that question of legitimacy in the video essay format: “What place does it have in the discourse?” And just to get that recognition that you’ve made something meaningful in a format that a lot of people still don’t understand is really cool.
Ellis: On that gaining of legitimacy, I know a couple of Youtube-based publications that were excited about it. Youtube has had a really bad press year, because it’s kind of a cess pool full of toxicity. So when something like this happens they can kind of claim it like “See, we’re not all Nazis!”
In the wake of this success the two creatives continue to innovate. In a meta-textual stroke, they have even turned the critical lens on their own medium, with videos on the subjects of product placement and an unprecedentedly personal examination of the concept of “Manufactured Authenticity” on “cake Youtube” and other online media platforms. There’s no telling where the channel is likely to go next, but it’s safe to assume that they’ll continue to defy their audience’s expectations and their format’s perceived limitations.
