When I was in film school, I was constantly looking to supplement my learning. I think that’s important, no matter what education you have or are receiving – just being a passive passenger in your own educational journey and expecting your professors to feed you knowledge bite by bite is a recipe for mediocrity. It’s far more interesting to learn things everywhere you can and then utilize the time with your professors to bounce ideas off of them, challenge them, let them challenge you. That gets you much further as a filmmaker, and as a person.
One thing I discovered during film school is this wonderful YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting by a guy called Tony Szhou. And even though it’s been 12 years since, I still have such vivid memories of watching these videos during my years at Berkeley.
EFaP was kind of the first YouTube channel that really made the “Essay Film” popular. This format is essentially a narrated slideshow on steroids, combined with a really clever film theory essay. The narrator presents a well-established factual group of things, or comes with a wholly novel idea that they present to the viewer. This is quite similar to writing essays in film school, which many think is a dumb waste of time – especially now when you can just have AI write for you – but those people miss the point, AI or not: Writing is a creative, exploratory experience where you become so deeply connected to a subject, and give yourself the chance to master understanding of something that’s always fascinated or disturbed, or annoyed you. Writing essays is vital to shape our mushy brains, and EFaP did that in the ultimate way – in the form of a narrated film analysis.
Some Must-Watch Highlights from Every Frame a Painting
There are intellectual pieces like Vancouver Never Plays Itself (a play on words, an interesting insight in the strange relationship of “film cities” and the cities that people want to watch, and a love letter to Tony7’s hometown).
But then there are super pragmatic, funny and useful pieces, like this one:
Appreciating the Pulp
One of the first videos I saw on it, and that stuck with me for forever, is that EFaP analyzed the work of Michael Bay. This runs totally counter to this sort of entitled, elitist air that some film professors think we should all have – appreciate Hitchcock, revere Fritz Lang, but please, never everrrr watch a second of Reality TV or think there’s any art to Michael Bay’s films. Well, EFaP goes as far as saying that Michael Bay actually created – for better or worse – a new genre: Chaos Cinema. And the last thing you should do with these things is ignore them and bury your head in the sand. No, we should experience these versions of the medium, and then have our personal, educated opinion about them, and let them influence our work if we like.
Inside the Mind of the Experts
Tony went and explored specific jobs on and off set, and took classic movies as a way to gain insight in them. There’s How an Editor Feels, and the very recent Where to Place a Camera. Super practical, immediately useful on your next project.
Eventually, like many wonderful things on the internet, the channel was retired in 2016/2017, shortly reawakened in 2024 for a short stint, and now it’s just an amazing archive. Read more about its life and retirement from the creators of the channel. But more importantly, go bookmark and watch it during your lunch breaks, on the train, wherever you can. It’s an amazing film education, made with so much love and deep insights; it’s a gift to the internet.
Toby
