Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting. ⇒
4 December 2017, early morning
Tony Zhou’s series of movie making was amazing, and i’m sad to see it go. The first thing I learned reading this article was that there was a second person involved in making the films, Taylor Ramos.
But as always, there’s a difference between what the law says and how the law is implemented. You could make a video that meets the criteria for fair use, but YouTube could still take it down because of their internal system (Copyright ID) which analyzes and detects copyrighted material.
So I learned to edit my way around that system.
Nearly every stylistic decision you see about the channel — the length of the clips, the number of examples, which studios’ films we chose, the way narration and clip audio weave together, the reordering and flipping of shots, the remixing of 5.1 audio, the rhythm and pacing of the overall video — all of that was reverse-engineered from YouTube’s Copyright ID.
It’s annoying they had to deal with this, but it’s also interesting that the constraints YouTube placed on them helped produce the series unique style. Unfortunately, this could only get them so far.
The script you’re reading right now is the ultimate example of our failure. We could not figure out how to turn this script into a video essay. Half of the things in this script required filming new footage, or using still images or extensive re-writes to fit other people’s footage. In other words, this script shows the limits of the style we forged three years ago — and frankly, it was pretty constricting.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.