Frame of Reference
My favorite YouTube channel is BACK!
In the last few years, a bunch of YouTubers have made a lot of noise about “quitting” the platform. While some return, it’s rare. So when I saw that a 27 second video had been posted to the YouTube account of “Every Frame a Painting,” I literally squealed.
Every Frame is Taylor Ramos, an animator, and Tony Zhou, an editor. In basically all the videos on the channel, Tony reads an essay over film clips that demonstrate their points. (The videos almost all start with “Hi, my name is Tony.”) The essays rarely spent much time covering the plot or characters of the films in questions, but rather their form. They would focus on details about the edit, explain why a scene worked, or one particular artist’s style.
Crucially, no video on the channel is longer than 15 minutes. None needs to be—Ramos and Zhou always manage to establish the essay’s aim, support their argument, and entertain without overstaying their welcome. I guess, as freelancers, the pair knows how to avoid scope creep.
In the time since September 2016, when they “quit” YouTube, the video essay economy has changed a lot. The stuff that crosses my homepage is rarely under an hour, likely to maximize engaged time. A lot of it is pretty lazy. For example, I will never get back the hours I wasted watching this limp synopsis of everything that happened during “The Suite Life on Deck.” (Exception: I loved Jenny Nicholson on the failed “Star Wars Hotel.”)
That’s not to say there aren’t creators dutifully feeding the algorithm with digestible essays for inquiring eyeballs. I kept getting recommended a 2023 video from CinemaStix (a channel with 550k-ish subscribers) that was ostensibly about what Chris Columbus brought to the first two Harry Potter movies. From the first sentence of the essay, it felt obvious to me the creator had watched Every Frame videos. The way they cut between the “Directed by Chris Columbus” title cards from different films mirrors the opening of the Every Frame video on David Fincher. Even the way they introduce themselves—“Hey, I’m Danny Boyd”—feels of the Every Frame cadence.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. “Good artists copy, great artists steal” etc, etc. But this particular video doesn’t really say much about Columbus as a director. After offering a list of what they admit are surface level similarities between “Home Alone” and the first two Harry Potter movies, Boyd basically just says Columbus was good at working with child actors and that the HP cast liked him. Thanks man, but I also watched the bonus features on the “Chamber of Secrets” DVD.
By contrast, the videos on Every Frame feel deeply informed by the pairs’ real experience as filmmakers. This is clearest in the first full new video they released, about the “Sustained Two-Shot,” a shot that just contains two people talking to each other. The setup for the video is an issue they experienced on the day of a shoot, when they had to think on the fly about how they would solve a problem with limited time. In this context, the exploration of the history around how the two-shot has evolved has real stakes, which makes watching the video about something I really have no business knowing anything about really fun.
I’m thrilled that they are back. Below, my four favorite videos they’ve made. They all still hold up.
Satoshi Kon - Editing Space & Time - I can recommend this video far more than I can recommend watching “Paprika” on a plane next to your parents.
The Spielberg Oner - “The most jerked off to type of shot in filmmaking”
Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy - No scaffolding was harmed in the making of this video essay.
In Praise of Chairs - Not just a prop!