How Star Wars was saved in the edit:
https://youtu.be/zEHRNS-Scrs - from the RocketJump Film School YouTube channel (2017 video essay - 18 minutes).“A video essay exploring how Star Wars’ editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became”
Written by David Welch.
Narrated and edited by Joey Scoma.Not to nitpick, but I’d think video essays might be a different category from documentaries? Your thread of course.
The thread title also includes “making ofs” and “promos”, and there’s been interviews added as well. Plus, I only wrote “video essay” because that’s what they called it. It’s basically a short documentary, and a really interesting one at that, so I felt it was worth sharing here.
As I said I will of course defer to you. I haven’t seen the video in question but I tend to think of a ‘video essay’ as an analysis of a work, rather than a behind the scenes documentary. But maybe I should watch the video before I critique.
Yeah, that’s what I’d generally associate with the word as well, and the video is partially an analysis, though I’d say it’s 80% a documentary about how ANH was re-edited after Lucas screened the rough cut to several filmmaker friends; incl. Spielberg and Brian De Palma, the latter of which was not particularly impressed (to put it mildly).