If you want to understand the visual form of films, I highly recommend Every Frame a Painting. Over the course of two years Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos made 28 short videos, 5-10 minutes long, which used carefully chosen and assembled film clips to illustrate one or another visual technique. Very instructive, always lovely to look at. Some favorites:
After two years Tony and Taylor were done — you can read about their decision to stop adding videos here — but their 28 visual essays live on, all of them having at least 1 million views. The Jackie Chan video has 25 million views. But rather than find a way to milk the channel, they moved on. Admirable!
This is brilliant. I’ve only watched the ‘how to do visual comedy’ video so far, but not only are the examples really good, the summary of techniques at the end is very clear.
I mentioned in my intro post that I’m currently trying my hand at some stop motion. It’s very early days for me, but I think this video series is going to be so useful to the other filmmakers I know. I’ll be sharing this in another community I’m in.
Edit: I’ve just watched ‘Composing Movement’ and it was SO good. I was also delighted to hear NY Rush by Yoko Kanno and the seatbelts - I know that from the anime, Cowboy Bebop.
Isn’t it good? I love how these videos both go against the current trends — revisit the same old (thin) content again and again, stretch it out to 20-40 minutes to make room for lots of ads — and embrace a direction I hardly see explored, namely to create reference-quality explanations with no fat. I’ve watched these repeatedly, always with pleasure, often learning something new.
I mentioned in my intro post that I’m currently trying my hand at some stop motion. It’s very early days for me, but I think this video series is going to be so useful to the other filmmakers I know. I’ll be sharing this in another community I’m in.
And I hope you’ll share about your stop motion experiments here! This community may be gathering because of a shared interest in @joanwestenberg’s thinking, but we all bring a rich body of life experience with us, and I can’t wait to hear what other things this unusual collection of thinkers can tell me about life.
After re-watching the Every Frame a Painting videos to write this post, I started getting other pertinent videos in my feed. Including this dissection of one particular EFaP video on editing. These guys are smart and knowledgable, their video is well produced, and they are absolutely geeking out about the greatness of the EFaP project. Well worth 25 minutes of your time. Note to self: look at their stuff, too.
I love it when knowledgable people have an expert-level conversation about some iconic accomplishment in their field, and this video oozes with that atmosphere. It reminds me of one particular behind-the-scenes podcast which I think of as a free film school — being someone who has no interest in making a film but is very interested in how they are made. But I’ll discuss that in a future post.
I often feel that it’s precisely these kinds of references that make me realise I’m missing something. And that’s where the doubt creeps in: whether to unsubscribe from a newsletter, stop following a blog… or stay.
Part of me no longer wants to keep collecting information. It feels like there’s a point where adding more doesn’t really add anything. And yet, with things like this, it’s hard not to engage. Not just because of the videos, but also because of the text that accompanies the decision to leave the channel — which I found very lucid.
I agree with what they say about ideas: writing them down without obsession, not constantly revisiting them, and accepting that the ones you forget may have deserved to be forgotten.
And the triangle… I’d say it applies to many disciplines. In architecture it works exactly the same way: you can’t have all three. There’s always an implicit trade-off. A house that is good, beautiful and cheap — the full package — doesn’t really exist, even though it’s constantly requested.
I also think that balance becomes more manageable when it’s shared with a partner. In my case, I run the studio with my wife, and she often acts as a filter. She’s the one who reminds me that I don’t need to demolish a wall just to move it twenty centimetres so the space matches exactly the image I have in my head. I don’t see that as a limitation — more as an anchor to reality.
The same tension appears with free content. There’s something strange about investing time, effort and thought without direct financial return. At times you do wonder why you’re doing it, especially when rent still needs to be paid. I suppose the same triangle shows up again, just in a different form.
There’s probably more to say, but I’ll leave it here, to let it settle.
Assuming I understand you … I feel your pain! Back in the day it was easier to manage my feed, especially since I mostly wasn’t being passively fed, what I consumed I needed to seek out. It was enough to just stay away from the obviously bad stuff. After that, the quantity of good stuff that my searching turned up was plentiful but not overwhelming. The effort it took to find good stuff was a natural brake on the amount I found.
Now I barely need to lift a finger. Just having a curiosity about a topic, however fleeting, quickly fills my feed with related stuff. Stuff that is good! Sometimes exceptional, sometimes surprising, sometimes life-changing … but mostly just good, valuable to the sort of person who values that sort of thing. And I find suddenly it isn’t enough to discern and reject the bad stuff, I need to now be picky, to consider the many good directions I could pursue, narrow them down to those I actually have time to pursue, narrow further to the ones I can most profitably pursue.
The narrowing-down I describe is aspirational — in truth, when I get overwhelmed I usually strip things way, way back, creating huge amounts of space in my attention span, then loosen my grip a bit and see what sorts of things begin to leak back in. On each go-round I’m more ruthless, more realistic about which whims might turn into profitable pursuits — those get to linger, at least for awhile — and which whims are likely to go nowhere special — those get nipped in the bud.
Since one of my personal guidelines for writing is to always give concrete examples, here is one of each.
Nipped in the bud: I like to camp, especially in west Texas, which has some of the darkest skies in the world. So I thought stargazing might be a good hobby for me. I collected quite a few books about it, studied them, bought good binoculars and a nice telescope, took them camping with me. I worked at it for awhile, learning constellations and how to locate them, celestial objects and how to train a telescope on them. It was fun. But never became more than that. Constellations and celestial objects have the quality of being unchanging, so once the novelty had worn of it didn’t do much for me to take yet another look at a nebula or the Pleaides.
At that point the drawbacks began to weigh more heavily: the cold! and the drowsiness! When I camp I enjoy early rising and early bedtimes, neither of those work well with stargazing in the depth of night. Soon enough I decided that I’d go no deeper into the hobby, returns were quickly diminishing. Now I enjoy sitting out in the early evening or (occasionially) getting up before sunrise and just looking at the stars. That’s it.
Lingering: Gaming of all sorts never worked for me — board games, card games, RPGs, first-person shooters, strategy games, construction games, cooperative games, on and on. Which bothers me: I’d like to have something like that as an occasional distraction, and though I don’t like competition I do enjoy puzzling things out. So I’m ever on the lookout for possibilities.
About a month ago, for some reason chess came to mind. I knew how to move the pieces, but anything above that level was a mystery to me. And I knew, vaguely, that there were lots of different sorts of things to learn about playing the game — strategy, tactics, history. I looked into it a little bit, enough to see that there was knowledge to be had and that I could probably absorb some of it. Maybe enough to know what it would feel to play a game like a chess player, so I could get an inkling of whether I’d like that. I signed up for an account on chess.com and day by day worked my way through the online lessons, plus some of the puzzles. I liked it! Enough to buy a standard set of books for beginners covering strategy and tactics, openings, mid-games, endgames. I’ve looked through those.
All that was enough to make it clear if chess wasn’t for me. But it didn’t. Though I don’t know yet if chess is in fact for me, there’s hope in the fact that I’ve stuck with it for forty days and look forward to doing more. And if I do end up plateauing and moving on, I’ll still be glad for what I learned.
