"Hi. My name is Tony, and this is Every Frame a Painting."
—The opening to every one of his episodes.
A defunct
film form analysis show by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos. The show highlights specific creators or elements of film to aid understanding and film literacy.
You can watch it in this Youtube channel. Also has accounts in Twitter and Tumblr. Tony occasionally posts articles (his and from other sources) with additional content in both.
Every Frame a Painting provides examples of:
- Anything but That!: While showing the difference between a profile and a head-on shot, Tony cuts to Hugh Jackman from Les Misérables (2012).Tony: God, stop! Ugh, god!
- Behind the Black: Discussed as one of Buster Keaton's trademark rules: "If the camera can't see it, the characters can't see it, either."Tony: In Buster's world, the characters are limited by the sides of the frame and what's visible to us, the audience, and this allows him to do jokes that make sense visually, but not logically.
- Bile Fascination: Taken to the logical extreme with his Bayhem essay. He makes it clear from the get-go that he doesn't like Michael Bay's movies, but nonetheless goes into detail about why his style is so profitable. He even uses a snippet of a Werner Herzog interview to help illustrate his point on the matter.
- California Doubling: Discussed in Vancouver Never Plays Itself, which goes into examples of how Vancouver (Tony's hometown) has been used in films to portray other cities, and the many tricks of the trade that filmmakers use to disguise it.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The earlier episodes tend to have more jokes and one-liners, before Tony set into the pure analysis.
- Edutainment: The ways Tony analyzes and discusses the topics in his episodes are not only informative, but rather entertaining in their own right.
- The Oner: Discussed in The Spielberg Oner, which compares the flashier examples found in most of present-day film against the more practical, invisible ones used by Spielberg. Tony prefers the latter.
- Shot/Reverse Shot: Discussed in Joel & Ethan Coen - Shot | Reverse Shot, specifically how they make theirs interesting. On top of precise, near-invisible timing, they usually frame the camera in between the characters, making the audience feel more involved and somewhat "trapped" with them, building an awkward yet amusing sympathy. They also manage to get the surroundings around them within frame, usually providing information about even minor characters involved.
- Talking Heads:
- In his Edgar Wright essay, Tony criticizes comedy films, particularly American ones, for largely devolving into this. He then analyzes how Wright averts the trope in his films.
- He also analyzes an alternative to this trope in his Memories of Murder essay, discussing its heavy use of ensemble staging? .
- Point of No Return: His Snowpiercer episode is centered around showing this in film. In a lesser sense, Tony often says this before he needs to go into details involving spoilers.
