Loading...Video essays, while a seemingly boring category of online video, are actually one of my very favorite types of videos. These are videos in which the creator teaches us about one thing or another, whether it’s history or cinematography techniques or political policies, through telling us a story. These stories can be about people, or what has happened in the past, or how the topic affects us now. Video essays are more than just typical school essays in a video format; they are interesting educational videos infused with storytelling, emotion, and teaching in a way that enlightens the viewer in a way that is more than just hammering facts into their brain. (Which is perfectly okay too, although as when made interesting typical textbook material can be very entertaining. See Crash Course to see what I mean.) A great example of a creator that makes fantastic video essays is The Nerdwriter, run and hosted by Evan Puschak, and today’s channel showcase, Delve, run and hosted by Adam Westbrook.
Adam has been making videos on the Internet all the way back since 2009, his videos gaining the attention of many large publications and racking up millions and million of views for channels like Fusion. In 2013, Adam started his most recent project Delve, a YouTube channel that makes video essays about topics ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci and World War I. His videos are aesthetically very well put together, usually using animation and historical/stock footage along with a voiceover to tell his stories, which he does wonderfully. Never will you be more emotionally invested in learning about World War I than when watching his video on the topic.
The video above is a great example of Delve’s great storytelling in an educational context. The video is about Claude Shannon, a mathematician, engineer, and the “father of information theory”. Before the Internet, it would have been hard to imagine a world in which you could duplicate a whole book in a couple minutes if not seconds, or take a photo and send it to the other side of the world in a matter of moments. Claude Shannon was one of the people who helped make the leap from thinking about information as whole images, books, articles, etc, to just groups of 1s and 0s, as they are represented now.
The video is fascinating, telling the story of how Claude Shannon and his revolutionary ideas on how information is stored and transmitted. The best part of the whole video is the fact that before watching it, I’d bet you’d never have even heard of Claude Shannon, and after you know exactly what he did and how he changed our world today on a big-picture scale. Many of his videos have that quality, as well as simply being well made and entertaining. Delve does what many educational channels can’t do: make videos that captivate you in it’s storytelling and in the end teach you something valuable and still somehow very interesting.