Art in motion

Today in drop-everything-and-watch-this news: the YouTube channel Every Frame A Painting has just released a new video after a seven year hiatus!

Run by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, Every Frame A Painting was a series of video essays about the art of filmmaking; not the way films came together on a story or character level, but the techniques of shooting any sort of story on film. What is the language of filmmaking? How do you use your actors and characters to play into the story, how do you use sound, camera movement, music, and framing to tell the story itself?

The channel was a huge influence on how I've watched movies and TV shows ever since, and over the years, I'll get into a mood where I'll go back and watch the entire series (28 videos in all) just to get inspired or to think about filmmaking and storytelling.

Some of my favorites include "Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy" (if you watch any of these, watch this one), "Michael Bay - What is Bayhem?", "A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film", "Robin Williams - In Motion," "David Fincher - And the Other Way is Wrong," "Chuck Jones - The Evolution of an Artist," and "Buster Keaton - The Art of the Gag." Each of those provided some enlightening takes on how these various directors have worked, and how they've made films and stories that endure.

In 2017, the pair called it quits, writing that "when we started this YouTube project, we gave ourselves one simple rule: if we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them. And one day, we woke up and felt it was time." I can applaud that decision: so many projects linger on long after their sell-by date has passed. Better to go out on top than dwindle into meaninglessness.

The pair also noted that they had moved on to other jobs. They've done some directing: they did three episodes of Netflix's 2021 documentary series Voir, and recently completed a short film, The Second.

To tie in with that film, they've announced that they're bringing the Ever Frame a Painting series back for a limited number of episodes, culminating in the release of that short film, which stars Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Ethan Hwang. It's exciting to see that they're back, especially if they've been putting the work that they've talked about for so long online into the actual production of a film.

This first episode right out of the gate is pretty interesting, looking at scenes where you have both actors in frame talking to one another. It's a style that's not used as much, because filmmakers aren't constrained by the amount of physical film they have available to them: digital cameras frees them up to move the camera around in a whole range of different angles. The reason to keep using this sort of shot? To highlight the chemistry between the actors. It's not something that I've really paid attention to, but I will from now on.

I'm not sure what the tempo of the upcoming episodes in this series will be, but I'm eager to see what they've got in store. If you haven't watched the series before, it's definitely worth checking it out and subscribing.