Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting (2017)
medium.com
medium.com
Copyright and the rabid defense of IP by corporations shapes so much of what we're allowed to see and talk about and how we have to address those things. There's no telling how much better these already great videos would have been if they weren't shackled by fear of censorship or attack by media cartels.
These guys had the time, skill, and energy to figure out how to work around the problem, but I can't help but wonder how much stuff we're missing out on because a system designed to encourage the creation and propagation of creative works has been perverted to control and suppress it instead.
If system == YouTube, then it does exactly what it was designed: makes money. For it, it has to play by the rules of copyright.
If system == the internet, it was not built to propagate creative works either, its purpose was reliable delivery of arbitrary data.
Many of youtube's problems are caused by their attempts to alleviate increasing pressure from powerful media industry organizations like the RIAA and MPAA who insist that youtube must aggressively enforce their copyrights for them. I think youtube should do better than they have in their efforts, but I also appreciate their position.
The internet as a whole suffers in its own ways because of these company's abuse of copyrights to control our access to our own culture such as the inclusion of DRM in standards like HTML and the pressures placed on ISPs to act as copyright police and ban their customers from having any access to the internet based on nothing more than the unproven accusations that a subscriber has circumvented a corporation's copyrights.
Many people have had their videos censored without violating any copyrights at all. Many many more have had their original content removed for what would clearly fall under fair use. I haven't seen a case where a large media company has ever been meaningfully punished for blatant abuse of the DMCA.
> Who says everyone should have the right to profit off somebody else's work?
Who says someone should be able to buy the rights to profit off someone else's work and then continue to profit on it indefinitely? It's in our power to choose what copyright means. Right now we've ceded that power to media companies who have bribed their way into getting the laws they want passed and into positions of power within our government itself. They've used that power to turn a good idea (limited protections to give creators a chance to profit from their works) into the broken system we have now where copyrights are perpetually extended and creators are routinely screwed over by massive corporations who want to act as gatekeepers.
The images in Every Frame a Painting are almost entirely other people's work. I'm not saying it's not legal fair use or that they didn't add their own creative and hard work on too, but it's still other people's work. They could have made their own movie scenes but that would probably be too expensive so they used someone else's. There are other creators who do make their own images and music, and they won't be struggling with copyright for the most part.
Maybe people are defensive because EFAP is so obviously and heavily using copyright protected work and they feel the need to point out that it's also got original material too in case people think it's just a bunch of random movie clips.
I've heard a lot of Youtube creators complain about copyright detection but in every case that I can recall, they really did use somebody else's work and the algorithm correctly detected it. It might not have correctly judged fair use, that's not my point. Interesting cases of raindrops are exceptional and I'm sure are not a normal concern at all.
As for indefinite copyright, that's a separate point, but why not? Copyright protection doesn't prevent anybody else from doing anything as long as they don't copy your work. So in the worse case, it's as if you never made the protected work in the first place. That's not like patents which can be for important non-creative inventions that can't necessarily be done just as well some other way. It's all creative work and there's nothing stopping somebody else from making something just as good without copying it.
That's like saying when you copied part of the previous comment[1], you could have written your own quote instead. EFAP's whole point is analysing the movies we have seen; creating their own scenes is not just more expensive, it would be missing the point.
Then let me help you: https://www.eff.org/takedowns
A sound. Generated by nature. Produced uniquely at your own location. Is copyrighted.
What are you even on about?
Man, what an apt way to explain my frustration with the monoculture of the web. But it's creeping into the world of books, where fewer and fewer writers know how to research anything. I cannot tell you the number of books I have picked up lately that cite things they saw on Twitter or gleaned from a Google search.
"Echo Chambers" etc... could be merely a distributed version regurgitated content, however I think the HN community tends to self-police groupthink
Regurgitating a meaninglessly mangled version of something (intentionally or not) on order to plagiarize without getting caught, is terrible pollution.
I'd commented on the postmortem essay shortly after it was published with some additional thoughts of relevance to my own (very non-cinematic) work:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7hgb24/brillia...
(I'd also submitted the same link, a minute after smacktoward did, full credit to them it's a very worthwhile submission.)
I think they did overreach with some conclusions. For example, his "obvious" conclusion about the story told by the edition in the clip with the father and the two young daughters wasn't at all obvious to me (and judging by the comments on that video, a lot of other viewers didn't get it either). I suppose it's part of the subconscious knowledge someone in the industry has which someone outside doesn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs
Other solid works by her include a postmortem on the last season of Game of Thrones and an analysis of themes in Michael Bay's Transformers. (I know that last one sounds weird, but it's really well done.)
but it's not artistic
Lessons from the Screenplay - Similar to EFaP but for screenplays (obviously)
Wendover Productions - Many topics but generally focuses on Logistics, Aviation, Economics, Geography, and their intersections
Ahoy - Video games, firearms, and their intersection
NoClip - Video games; Their format is more traditional documentary as opposed to video essay, but I feel compelled to mention them here due to their quality work (disclaimer: I donate to them via Patreon)
I think it helped that the creator (Tony Zhou) is himself a filmmaker and editor. It felt like I was watching a well-done film about films, rather than a "video essay". A lot of these other media analysis channels seem to be from fairly ordinary people without professional experience.
If you want film stuff, Criterion's Observations on Film Art is fantastic but not on YouTube. They have short excerpts but the whole videos are far better. I do love Criterion's channel though for its closet series where famous film people pick out Blu-rays and DVDs to take home. Seeing what filmmakers pick and say about their picks is super interesting.
Music Commentary - Middle8 (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfeppgcy70ERp4gQrsYijsg) Nerdwriter-esque content focusing on music.
Besides commentary there is also the whole maker community that produces fantastically produced videos for metal/woodwork - Clickspring (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA), This Old Tony (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NO8MgTQKHAWXp6z8Xl7yQ), DiResta (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEk4xHBbz0hZNIBBpowdYQ), etc
Yeah, when you watch a lot of stuff with an analytical eye, you start to see patterns. Eventually you get to the point where you can pause it, make a prediction about what's gonna happen, and be right 90% of the time. Which is either super annoying to the people you're watching it with, or a really fun game if everyone involved is this genre-savvy.
Getting close to that level is pretty much a requirement for getting a job like "editor" or "storyboard" or "script-writer".
Are there are other film-related YouTube channels people recommend?
Two I recently discovered:
Mystery Clock Cinema: Film director Alex Proyas ('Dark City', 'I, Robot') talks on camera about independent filmmaking
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO7h2SOZjRah8bhyOXtGHw/vid...
Ponysmasher: Film director David Sandberg ('Annabelle Creation', 'Shazam!') has a few behind-the-scenes videos and thoughts on filmmaking. The channel is not updated very often, but his most recent video 'Random Lessons Learned from Making Films' is very watchable and has a surprising (and very honest) revelation near the end of the video:
Lessons from the Screenplay: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErSSa3CaP_GJxmFpdjG9Jw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvDvESEXcgE&list=PLibNZv5Zd0...
Wow. Talk about “the medium is the message”.
I've thought about doing videos of my own on various topics (the usage of eyes and glances in Il Posto, Kieslowski's poetry, the reflexivity of In the Mood for Love, etc.) but the YouTube film criticism industry is pretty saturated. Perhaps a different format?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UE3jz_O_EM [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8
He’s on the same level as Lynch for me; they both found their favourite perversion.
As for Fincher, Mindhunter is the spiritual successor to Zodiac. It’s fantastic.
Obviously they had a great product -- everyone I've shown EFaP to loves it. They could have spun it into something of a personal brand (like, say, CGP Grey or Nerdwriter did). But instead killed it off because it felt like more of a burden than a reward.
Might have been on monetization, or personal perspective. In the essay they seem uncompromising on quality, but there are probably ways to get similar quality output with fewer hours by improving the workflow. I imagine if they made tens of thousands of dollars per video, or built a large brand of the video's success, they wouldn't have felt like such a burden either.
“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts”.
Edit: and because “Vancouver never Plays Itself” (the phrase, the concept, the idea) has transcended.
I watched every EFaP video and never noticed Taylor existed. :-(
[...]
>Everything costs something to make. If a person is putting out content for free, that means they’re not getting paid for their time.
First of all, remember when people posted things on the internet just out of our desire to share things? I certainly support Tony's decision to shut this down - it is his decision to make, and no one should feel FORCED to create content for free.
But second of all, doesn't the second commend contradict the first?
>I certainly support Tony's decision to shut this down - it is his decision to make, and no one should feel FORCED to create content for free.
In this case the ambiguity has allowed them to say That which is free is not free, meaning that which is free to consume is not free to make.
I certainly remember people posting stuff on the internet for free out of their desire to share. I also remember lots of those people over the years shutting down their delightful sites because not having the time to keep doing things for free, nor the money to pay for the hosting or other things like that.
I guess it depends on what cost you want to include? I create content "for free" using my free time. Would you consider my mortgage, the cost of my computer, etc, to be part of the cost, so it is not "free" ? I wouldn't, because I would incur those costs whether or not I was making content "for free".
>I certainly remember people posting stuff on the internet for free out of their desire to share. I also remember lots of those people over the years shutting down their delightful sites because not having the time to keep doing things for free, nor the money to pay for the hosting or other things like that.
Yes, more and more all the time - exactly my point. And like I said in my original post, it is certainly there prerogative. If they don't enjoy it, they should stop.