
Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting - 19870213
https://medium.com/@tonyszhou/postmortem-1b338537fabc
======
nindalf
This news breaks my heart because Every Frame is my favourite youtube channel
bar none. I feel empty knowing that I won't get to watch another video from
them.

I did enjoy reading this though, because learning more about their creative
process helps me appreciate them that much more. It now makes sense why the
Jackie Chan video was amazing - it was a 150 hour labour of love from
knowledgeable professionals who spared no effort.

For me, watching this channel was more than just an enjoyable 10 minutes - it
helped me understand and appreciate film for the first time ever. I could
always say that I loved the opening sequence of Pixar's Up, that it brought
tears to my eyes, but I could never express what made it so special. Tony and
Taylor gave me the vocabulary and the ability to do so, and I'm forever
indebted to them for that alone. Thanks guys.

~~~
erikpukinskis
It’s kind of amazing... at 150 hours, even after 900 people have watched your
video, you’ve still invested more time than all of your viewers combined.

At 9,000 views society is leveraging 10 units of consumption for every 1 unit
of work.

So big YouTubers who get on the order of a million views per video and spend
an order of magnitude less time on the content are producing entertainment at
an approximately 10,000:1 ratio. Ten thousand hours of mindless consumption
for each hour of work they put in.

~~~
nindalf
> mindless consumption

I'm uncomfortable with this characterization of consumption. I'm not doubting
that most consumption is passive, but I think its a bit unfair to most people.
Even creators, including in this case, Tony and Taylor are consumers 99% of
the their lives. Nor is consumption a bad thing - watching Every Frame changed
the way I think - which is great.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I thought twice about that word “mindless” but I stand by it.

I was explicitly not talking about Tony and Taylor I was talking about
creators who put in “an order of magnitude less effort” and get a million
views per video.

Much of that content is mindless. Not all. And I’m not judging mindless
entertainment. Mindfulness is one thing, not everything. But I think it’s a
fair characterization of the typical in the segment I described. It’s worth
noting that to get to that level of viewership you typically need to be
producing very consistent content daily.

------
madmax108
Big fan of Every Frame a Painting. Loved the indepth breakdowns the channel
did and really affected the may I look as film as a medium. Sad to hear that
it winded down.

For others interested in similar channels, here's my list:

NerdWriter:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdwriter1](https://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdwriter1)

Lessons from the Screenplay:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErSSa3CaP_GJxmFpdjG9Jw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErSSa3CaP_GJxmFpdjG9Jw)

The Film Theorists:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/FilmTheorists](https://www.youtube.com/user/FilmTheorists)

Beyond The Frame:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ7g7HfH1gWmhgxW47IcW7Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ7g7HfH1gWmhgxW47IcW7Q)

Wisecrack:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/thugnotes/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/thugnotes/videos)

Movies I Love (and so can you):
[https://www.youtube.com/user/MarcusHalberstram88/featured](https://www.youtube.com/user/MarcusHalberstram88/featured)

~~~
LeonidasXIV
I would also add Now You See it:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTFGPpNQ0Ms6afXhaWDiRw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTFGPpNQ0Ms6afXhaWDiRw)

------
pgrote
This is insane.

"I spent about a week doing brute force trial-and-error. I would privately
upload several different essay clips, then see which got flagged and which
didn’t. This gave me a rough idea what the system could detect, and I edited
the videos to avoid those potholes."

It is amazing the hoops people have to go through to enjoy the rights provided
by law.

~~~
pjc50
I'm fairly sure people have been through similar experiences trying to get
films through manual censorship processes.

It would be interesting to know what they found about where the boundaries lie
and how this compares to the "traditional" approach - sample clearance. I'm
fairly sure that if you tried to get _approval_ for using lots of micro-clips
it would be incredibly time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, or both.

~~~
mtpn
> I'm fairly sure that if you tried to get approval for using lots of micro-
> clips it would be incredibly time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, or
> both.

But approval is not needed. These videos are pretty much textbook examples of
legally-protected fair use of the content they discuss. The labor necessary to
get such content through the gates at YouTube is stifling others who can’t
dedicate the kind of time needed to skirt their overzealous copyright
protections.

~~~
anigbrowl
Shifting economic burdens onto the least well-resourced is a standard formula
in American business and public life.

------
forgot-my-pw
A lot of good lessons in the script. It may not be apparent, but they sure put
a lot of hours into making the videos. I especially like the point of no
Googling for research (research offline). Every Frame a Painting feels unique
because they don't just try to echo other's opinions.

    
    
      A huge percentage of the Internet is the same information, repeated over and over again. This is especially apparent on film websites; they call it aggregation but it’s really just a nicer way to say regurgitation.
    

It's sad that they couldn't turn it as a final video, even using a very
different style (breaking from their norm). It feels that a video channel
deserves a video closure, not a blog post.

I'm happy that both of them finds happiness in their new jobs and location.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Can I ask that people quote things like this:

> _So that it wraps when you have a long line, so that it wraps when you have
> a long line, so that it wraps when you have a long line, so that it wraps
> when you have a long line_

Instead of like this

    
    
        so I have to scroll horizontally to read beyond about 120 characters

~~~
kaishiro
This is unfortunately a losing battle. It kills me that people overload the
code blocking for quotes because it's simply unreadable on mobile/tablet.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Looks fine on iPhone.

~~~
kaishiro
I'm on an iPhone - it does not.

------
pulisse
This was an interesting detail: _Nearly every stylistic decision you see about
the channel — the length of the clips, the number of examples, which studios’
films we chose, the way narration and clip audio weave together, the
reordering and flipping of shots, the remixing of 5.1 audio, the rhythm and
pacing of the overall video — all of that was reverse-engineered from
YouTube’s Copyright ID._

------
pjc50
"A huge percentage of the Internet is the same information, repeated over and
over again. This is especially apparent on film websites; they call it
aggregation but it’s really just a nicer way to say regurgitation."

I think this is increasingly a problem, and various forms of clickbait make it
worse. As does the counter-trend of demanding sources for everything. Where
only online sources are acceptable.

~~~
anigbrowl
As I keep saying, this is a fundamental limitation of the web, which shows you
leaves on trees. What you _want_ is the inversion of that as a dynamic DAG in
3d. This would be the killer app for VR.

~~~
mkl
Huh? How could VR possibly get rid of "the same information, repeated over and
over again"? The problem comes from limited research (fast & cheap, not good),
not HTML presentation. VR is not going to help with that, as it's not going to
magically replace Google (which already indexes books anyway).

~~~
anigbrowl
Because VR makes it easier to look at the structures like the branches of the
tree. You can put this on a screen too, of course, but from a user interface
point of view it's a bit like looking at the world through a letterbox.

The 3d-ness of VR makes it easier for people to maintain a persistent mental
model of a virtual environment than that which can be presented through a
single screen, and that facilitates the presentation and navigation of complex
structural information in 3 dimensions.

------
aerovistae
This channel was really amazing, got a lot out of it, noticed things I'd never
noticed before. Highly recommend along with _Lessons From The Screenplay._

------
golergka
Why don't Netflix or Amazon pick them up?

Cheap production. These companies eat copyright problems for breakfast.
Documentary series seem to be popular lately, and Every Frame is already a
well-known name.

~~~
scribu
It looks like the creators weren’t interested:

> We didn’t care about cheap or fast, we cared about it being _good_. [...]

> If we sold the channel to another company, or partnered with some network,
> then we would no longer control the triangle. And guess which of these three
> things would get sacrificed first?

Edit: added exact quote from article

~~~
avar
They have over a million subscribers on YouTube. They could just post a video
saying "listen, YouTube sucks, sign up for us on Patreon, if we get more than
$X at minimum $Y per-person we'll make the next video and send you all a
hosted download link".

There's podcasts with less reach than this channel that easily make $100K per
upload in revenue.

~~~
scribu
Why do you assume that monetisation was the main problem? This wasn't a
startup that needed to return 10 times the initial investment in 5 years.

The impression I got from the postmortem was that they just got tired of the
format and wanted to do something else.

~~~
avar
I have not assumed that, we're commenting on a specific sub-problem they
mentioned in their post in this thread, yes they made it abundantly clear that
it wasn't the only reason.

Between copyright issues on YouTube, getting around that by working with a big
partner that would sell their content, and getting donations on Patreon, they
never seemed to have considered selling access to high-quality content for a
fee _without_ partnering with someone.

I listen to several Podcasts that have something like this as a monetization
model, i.e. some sort of paid-for premium content or content exclusively for
subscribers.

------
huskyr
Apart from a wonderful end to a lovely YouTube channel this essay easily
surpasses most 'lessons learned' articles i've read. Kudos to Tony and Taylor
for having the motivation to write this down.

------
midoreigh
There is no wonder they stood out. They did research very thoroughly to create
every single video.

------
pavel_lishin
I've made a few toy films for work - an internal movie festival, nothing
professional - and I'm glad that their timelines look kind of close to what
mine look like, with things overlapping all over the place instead of
something neat and orderly.

------
anabisengrin
I watch a lot the French equivalent Blow Up [1], they are a lot more
productive, less didactic and I find them more irreverent & interesting. I
think they do not have any upload and rights issue because they are produced
by Arte, a Franco-German TV network

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfE1oQ47oqyJNzM-
nFy_gjA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfE1oQ47oqyJNzM-nFy_gjA)

------
valuearb
they said they stopped when it stopped being fun, after their marvel series.
Is there any clearer proof needed that Marvel is killing cinema?

------
johnnydoe9
While I'm sad my favourite channel has officially ended, I still feel so
grateful cause they made me look at movies in a different light.

------
ai_ia
One of my favotite channel. Sad, its over.

------
dingo_bat
> The big danger for future video essayists is that large websites have
> started moving away from the written word and towards video, which is
> completely unsustainable. Video is just too expensive and time-consuming to
> make. (TAYLOR) Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, nobody can cheat
> this triangle. And sooner or later, all of these large sites will bleed
> money, at which point some executive will say “We need to make our content
> both faster AND cheaper!”

I feel the field of video editing and clipping needs a solid dose of machine
learning and other software magic. In the future, creators like Tony and
Taylor will collect clips and start talking. And the software will edit,
transition and even reorder clips to match what's being spoken and what's
consistent with the style of the channel. Suddenly that 8 hours of editing per
minute of video will go down to 8 minutes. So get on it Adobe: make editing
great again!

PS: I fucking hate medium. How does shit like this even happen?
[https://imgur.com/UVdXKxk](https://imgur.com/UVdXKxk)

------
praneshp
Damn, this channel had under 30 videos, but I'm grateful to Tony (and
apparently Taylor; bad on me for not bothering to read the credits) for
helping me appreciate movies technically. It's been dead in all but name (no
videos for a year), but I read all of this classy post-mortem in Tony's voice.

~~~
scott_s
I’m going through now and watching the ones I missed before, and I think only
eight have the double credit. I assume you read that sentence the same way I
did, which was the _first_ video only had one credit, but all subsequent
videos credited both. But I think he meant the first one only credited him, he
just used the same template for a while, and started putting in a double
credit near the end.

------
gt_
Well, that is very sad. I just watched the final episode and it is probably my
favorite things I have watched in years. I truly mean this. I am a film editor
who truly despises temp music, and never knew about this episode. Bravo! I am
honestly just goig to watch this again, and admittedly in a self-righteous
pat-myself-on-the-back sort of way. I know, it’s awful, but so has watching
the art of film be sacrificed through these systemic abuses.

I may have just begun a marathon. I don’t know. I had work to do today.

~~~
praneshp
Unfortunately, they only made 30 videos (and now I understand why). So more
like a 10k than a marathon :)

I'm going to marathon today too (but I had no work to do).

~~~
frenchie4111
In memory, I will also put off work to run an Every Frame A Painting 10k today

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Gys
I thought it was about this animated movie of Vincent Van Gogh:
[http://lovingvincent.com/](http://lovingvincent.com/)

~~~
ohtwenty
I saw a poster for that somewhere and was hoping they'd mention it, but no
luck.

