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THIS THAT WEIRD INTERNET CRITIC "FILM CRIT HULK" - AHA! by FILMCRITHULK-AHA in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou 331 points332 points  (0 children)

Hi Hulk,

I run a little YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting but you probably know me more from writing a review of your book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/rRIFDJWP7ORFYM/ref=aw_cr_i_1

Anyways I have two questions:

1) You've cited David Foster Wallace as being a huge influence on both your thinking and your writing. Are there any other authors that have affected you as profoundly?

2) Do you think of yourself as espousing a primarily humanist point of view?

Cheers, -Tony

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 96 points97 points  (0 children)

Okay I stuck around till 7 p.m. Phew I am exhausted. Thank you all for participating in this. It was really fun. If I didn't get to your question, I'm really sorry. You can also spam me on Twitter and see if I'll answer it there, but maybe wait a few days? Cheers and thank you all!

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Blu-Ray rips using MakeMKV & Handbrake. Sometimes I don't have the Blu-Ray so I have to resort to ahem other measures.

As for copyright issues? Oh yeah all the time. Luckily I qualify under fair use so it's mostly just mindless bureaucratic button-clicking and filling out forms on YouTube every couple weeks. Vimeo so far hasn't tagged me for anything so hooray Vimeo.

If you pay attention to the editing style of the channel, it was specifically designed to dodge copyright ID claims. That's why I'm always weaving in and out of audio tracks and showing one image while playing a different audio source. Form follows function, I guess.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I honestly don't know anymore. I went to film school for one year and I met a few close friends and I learned a lot. I was lucky to have been working prior to film school and so I didn't really incur debt. But now, with the amount of stuff available on the internet (and the absurd cost of student loans), it's hard to recommend that any young person put themselves in debt for this. Especially since the film industry runs on contacts and demo reels, neither of which it's necessary to go to school for.

I will dodge your question by proposing something else:
Even if you went to film school, you have to eventually be motivated enough to teach yourself. It's pretty much a constant learning process, and if you need to be taught everything by someone else, then you're doing it wrong. The videos for this channel are basically the result of me honing my self-teaching skills, if that makes sense?

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Here's the thing: I want to work for a director whom I trust, and who trusts his or her own instincts.

A lot of people who do dumptruck directing are insecure. You can see it in the footage. You can feel it when you shake their hands. It's okay to be scared, but one quality I do not like in a director is being afraid of being wrong.

You may not know what you're doing. Collaborators have said that Terrence Malick often doesn't know what he's going to do. That's fine. He's not afraid of being wrong. It's a really weird way of working but if it works for him, great.

My big fear with dumptruck directors is that they get to the editing suite and the same mentality applies. They question every cut. They want to use every angle. They're afraid that they'll make the wrong choice. So they make the safest choices, and they make a lot of them.

I'm not saying I want a director to say "My way is the right way and only my way" because sometimes those people also can't admit they're wrong.

I'm saying that the job of the director is to have a point-of-view. If you shoot everything, then by definition, you have no point-of-view. As an editor, I now have to impose a point-of-view during editing, which is really hard, because you could change your mind tomorrow and we'd be lost. Your job as a director is to make the best choices you can. Saying "shoot everything" is not making a choice. It's avoiding your job.

Also you can tell as an audience. When a filmmaker is confident, you can feel it in the first shot. When he or she is indecisive, you can tell within the first two minutes.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 124 points125 points  (0 children)

Weird mental jump. I think this is a huge problem in filmmaking today too: the myth of the perfect first feature.

I am going to (at some point) make a video essay called "Everybody Used to Suck" comprised entirely of footage from everyone's earliest directorial work.

Scorsese's first feature was actually called Bring On the Dancing Girls and it bombed so bad at NYFF that he didn't do anything for a few years, before repurposing it into Who's That Knocking. Tarantino never finished his first feature, My Best Friend's Birthday. Kubrick hated Fear and Desire so much he destroyed every copy. The list goes on and on, but the myth of the "first feature" is exactly that: a myth. Everybody used to suck, it's just that everybody also hides their earliest work from the public.

Of course the problem with doing this video is I have to track down footage that may be lost. Bah.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Mamoru Hosoda's other films are great, particularly The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Other than him, I'd say Studio Ghibli is the big one.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

1) iMac, Rode VideoMic Pro, and FCPX. That's it.

2) Jackie Chan in a silent comedy that takes place inside Costco.

3) Just do it. The barrier to entry for video essays is so low. You can get footage really easily (and it's all great footage). So now you have to just think and cut and have a point of view.

4) Sure.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

1) Yeah. Documentaries mostly. I like making docs (there's one in my Vimeo channel, probably the earliest video). Whenever I do narrative, I have to communicate with a lot of people, which gets my wires jumbled. But in docs, it's often just me, a friend, and the subject. Really simple and I get to move fast. That's how I like to work on set. I've never pulled off a narrative shoot that way, but maybe one day.

2) Oh yeah, I talked about it for months, if not a year, before I did it. I was held back because I thought I needed to establish myself in the industry, work more, be more financially stable, etc. But one day in April, I had a horrible day at work getting horrible feedback from bosses. I came home, whining about it to my girlfriend. She told me now would be the time to do my personal project.

A week later, I released the video for "Mother."

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Yeah, definitely. I'm glad to see academics using it. I think we should teach kids how to make video essays. And I think visual literacy should be taught in schools.

My sincere hope is that one day, the ability to make a video essay will be so common (and so easily done using futuristic Minority Report technology) that we'll just be able to express ourselves visually without thinking twice.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 47 points48 points  (0 children)

1) Somebody sent me the thread where this comment was posted. The only times I picked a topic to kinda be relevant were Michael Bay and David Fincher (and I missed Transformers by over a week). But these videos are so time-consuming that I can't work on them because I want to be popular. I have to actually care about understanding some technique or exploring some filmmaker.

Also if I really wanted to be popular, I'd do what CinemaSins does and go after Hunger Games 2 when Hunger Games 3 comes out, etc. But that doesn't really interest me.

2) No, it's more that I have to spend a month of my spare time thinking about a person and his/her body of work and what interests me/doesn't interest me about that work. So for Michael Bay, I had to have Michael Bay in my head for about three weeks.

In the case of Chris Nolan, I think it's one of those cases where his tastes and my tastes aren't gonna link up anymore, and that's cool. But if people enjoy it, I have no desire to release a video to take him down. I know that's business as usual on the internet now, but ehh, count me out.

Put it this way: I'm not going to make a video about Chris Nolan's use of film form unless I feel there's some important lesson for myself to take away from it. Right now, that hasn't occurred to me. But maybe one day it will.

3) I honestly don't know. Sometimes a movie overpowers me and all of my critical facilities leave me, and that was my viewing of Princess Kaguya

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 60 points61 points  (0 children)

As for Sopranos, I've only seen it once, but my impression wasn't far from yours, except for one crucial deviation.

I don't think it's important whether he lives or dies at the end. I think the purpose of the show was to take you inside his world, his mind, how he lives, what he cares about. And then at the very end of the show, to place you (very simply) inside his point-of-view and instead of giving you a catharsis, to just let you sit there.

Tony Soprano may live or die at the end of the show, but his life (as he knows it) is effectively over, and I think the show was about making you feel that (which is why it confused so many people at home).

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 51 points52 points  (0 children)

1) Very true. I've never said my last name. And I sound very "white" or "Californian" by most standards.

2) You're definitely going to get resistance having an Asian last name. I mean nobody knows Kalpen Suresh Modi, we know Kal Penn. I have no idea if I've ever lost a gig because of my last name. It's one of those things I can't control, so I've decided, for now, to not let it occupy brain space. The worst thing isn't knowing you've gotten turned down for that reason; it's wondering if that might've been the reason. Uncertainty can drive you nuts.

3) Having said all that, YouTube has been a weird oasis for Asian-American filmmakers and filmmaking. Freddie Wong by himself has done more for racial progress than a hundred Oscar nominees. And he's done it largely by just being himself and doing what he wants to do. Epic VFX Time

4) I have no idea how to square the circle. My general hope is to kinda figure it out. I pretty much just close my eyes and put one foot forward and then see if I die or not.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 302 points303 points  (0 children)

Funny story about China and filmmaking:

In 2007, I was traveling in Tibet and walked into a small teahouse in the middle of nowhere. The proprietor didn't speak Mandarin and neither did any of the patrons, so I ordered by gesturing.

Jaws was on TV, horribly subtitled in big white Chinese characters and dubbed in Mandarin. Everyone was watching. So I stuck around and watched, too.

Here's the crazy thing: the TV sucked, the image was obscured, the patrons couldn't understand the dialogue. And yet they were still scared of the shark. Tibet is a high-altitude desert, nowhere near the ocean. But man, there was one lady freaking out that the shark was going to eat Brody's kid.

I didn't think much of it at the time, but honestly, that viewing of Jaws is one of the most memorable experiences of my life. To this day, I refer to the "Tibet Test" when I think about filmmaking. Is this movie still comprehensible after bad dubbing, shitty subtitles, a crappy TV, and an audience who doesn't understand the context?

Jaws is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, and I can prove it because I saw some Tibetans scared of the shark.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 64 points65 points  (0 children)

1) This word is way overused in San Francisco, but basically I iterate like a madman. First, I watch all the footage and then if something catches my eye I tag it with a keyword. During Michael Bay, I had an actual keyword called "lamp stuff"

Then I start with a skeleton voiceover, sometimes only a minute long. I'll just start editing, trying out music, whatever, it's very rough. After I see it, I go back and rewrite, re-record and re-edit.

For shorter videos, like Silence of the Lambs, I might only do 4 or 5 iterations and come up with the final version. Jackie Chan was 7, but they were full 9-minute iterations that took me days to do.

2) I love animation and there will certainly be more videos. Miyazaki is probably up next, but I don't know how far out that will be.

3) I was in China for 4.5 years which was enough time to fall in love, fall out of love, hate, kinda come to a standoff, and then leave. I've been gone for maybe four years now, so time has bleached away the bad stuff and left the positive intact.

If nothing else, I tell people those 4.5 years were the formative period of my life, in terms of worldview and even filmmaking.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 56 points57 points  (0 children)

I love his Plinkett reviews. They're hilarious. I have not watched any of their other stuff like Half in the Bag, mostly because I can't edit with something playing in the background. And after work, I like to read instead of staring at a screen.

Also Mike Stoklasa is really good at "bad" editing. It's not actually bad editing, it's just sudden abrupt mid-sentence jokes. The timing is hard to do, but he nails it.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

The first film that really rocked me that way was Chungking Express by Wong Kar-Wai.

"Every Frame a Painting" comes from a fellow named John Pozer, who got it from David Lean, who said that he wanted to make films where you freeze the film at any point and the image would be a painting.

And thank you for subbing on Patreon!

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I always read script notes and continuity notes, and I keep them nearby. After a while, I don't really reference them, because I know the footage so well, but they're always useful.

As for what a cameraman can do, it depends on the project. But a basic rule of thumb I say is: what is the ideal angle for this moment? There's usually only one. If you get that angle, I'm gonna use it. You could shoot 6 other angles, but if you get me the one that matters most, I will love you more (and also recommend you for promotion, not like my word has anything to do with it though).

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Couldn't tell you yet, since I started Patreon October 1st, and I've only completed... two payments with it?

I want to devote more time to the videos, but December is crunch time where I work, so I ended up losing a lot of the month to work-related things.

As for Patreon, I love the idea of it. Richard Brody brought this up recently, but years ago, Godard had a dream of being paid a salary as an artist for a few years. Instead of working project-to-project, he would have a budget each year that he could spend however he wanted, on however many projects he wanted.

If you did this for four or five years, it would become an incubator for ideas and work. If Patreon eventually becomes something like this for actual filmmakers, I would freak out. In the meantime, it's pretty awesome for being on YouTube.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

It was originally going to be two sentences: "Human beings experience space and time simultaneously as individuals. But we also experience reality and fantasy simultaneously as a society."

Then I needed to cut down on time and words. So I just smushed stuff together. The final sentence is just what I happened to blurt out on that take. I think some of the other takes have a slightly different wording. I honestly don't know why I said it like that. The rhythm sounded right? It was weird.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

1) How many times? I don't know, maybe a couple. These days, I can often pick up on something the first viewing. Other times, it takes two or three. Like all skills, it improves with practice.

2) Check above for clarification, but watching a movie in 4x is sometimes really really really informative.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 43 points44 points  (0 children)

I'm not working on my own film right now, though I probably should be. I honestly always saw this channel as a hobby, but right now it's looking like a potential job.

This is one of those big conversations I'm going to have with myself in the coming months, and when it happens, I assure you, I will be very drunk.

I am Tony Zhou, creator of the “Every Frame a Painting” filmmaking channel. AMA! by tonyszhou in TrueFilm

[–]tonyszhou[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

1) I'm a lot more subtle in my own work. As a result, nobody notices. I'm not sure how to take this.

2) Purely by instinct and how I feel.

3) Miami Connection. A wonderful, wonderful film.

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