For my video essay I decided to explore the glorification of male masculinity in the media. This essay provides examples of various ways in which the media glorifies and, in some cases, uses male masculinity as an endorsement tool for capitalist consumerism.

To create my video essay, firstly I decided I would use YouTube as the source for all my visual artefacts. This is because I think that YouTube has the best quality video samples for clips of movies and tv shows etc. Once I had found around 15 clips that I believed were suitable for my video essay I began to crop the clips to shorter lengths.

I aimed to curate clips from as many different forms of visual mediums as possible in order for my essay to have variation. I collected clips from films,television shows, film trailers and advertisements.

I used Adobe Premiere Pro to crop the clips and to put them all together. Once all the clips had been cropped and placed so that they would play one after another, I decided to add a suitable backing track. I decided to use a song from a royalty-free audio website to avoid any ethical problems. I then muted all the audio from the clips and chose to just have the music playing in the background. I made a few quick edits to the essay before it reached its final form. I used the ‘crossfade’ tool for the video and audio to open and close the essay as I felt that it would prevent the final artefact from appearing to start or finish abruptly, which i feel would harm the production quality of the essay.

Upon reflection on my video essay, using Kolb’s learning cycle, I feel that the clips that I selected were appropriate for the theme of my essay. If I were to redo the video essay, I would have added extra visual storytelling tools to the essay such as words to explain my essay. Due to my limited ability using Adobe Premiere Pro I was unable to do this, therefore in future I would aim to partake in an online tutorial for Premiere Pro to improve my skills using this software. I would have also used a larger variety of visual mediums to be represented such as clips from male ‘youtubers’ and masculine music videos.

As this task was carried out in a computer studio, there were no physical risks as my visual material was curated online and no filming took place. This meant that I did not fill in a health and safety form. On reflection I would have added a warning to my essay regarding ‘graphic scenes’ but there were no health and safety issues whatsoever when partaking in the curation of this artefact.