When Roger Ebert died, the film critic Wesley Morris wrote that "what Siskel and Ebert instilled in the civilian filmgoer was perception. Movies had a surface that could be penetrated and explored. They taught us how else to watch." That idea is everywhere in the YouTube Film School. Many of the creators work in film; others studied it, and some are just avid fans. Some offer technical tips, others critical dissections of works you know and love. If you watch them all long enough, you'll learn that there's more to the stuff you watch than you ever realized. And you'll learn how to watch for it.

Lesson Plans

You can't talk about YouTube Film School without talking about Tony Zhou, Taylor Ramos, and Every Frame a Painting. When Zhou, a film editor, and Ramos, an animator, created their channel in 2014, there wasn't much like it on YouTube. Video essays had been around for decades, of course: Zhou says some of the inspiration for the channel came from Orson Welles' F for Fake, which Zhou calls "the great essay-film." They'd seen a few essays online, too, from people like Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz. But nobody was doing it quite the way Zhou and Ramos wanted to do it. Their plan was "to have incredibly tight concentration of visual and aural cues," Zhou says. "The audience is sometimes listening, sometimes watching, and you get handed off from one to another." Too many videos were just narration over still shots, or text written on the screen, and neither worked for Zhou and Ramos. "Our videos were designed so you had to actually watch them."

Every Frame a Painting was a huge undertaking. Every video took weeks to create, dozens of hours sitting in front of a computer. They developed a style specifically to work within the confines of YouTube's Content ID system, which automatically flags copyrighted material on the site. Fair-use laws cover what Zhou and Ramos were doing, but YouTube's algorithms can be finicky. Like other YouTubers, they quickly learned a few tricks. "There were other people who would upload things at half-speed, then use the tool to play it back faster and see it normally," Zhou remembers. "I remember one day seeing clips on YouTube, and what they would do is take the video and flip it horizontally, then shrink the size and upload it." That worked too.

There were no ads on Every Frame a Painting videos, in yet another effort from the creators to stay out of copyright trouble. But pretty quickly, fans of the channel started asking how they could support the work. Ramos and Zhou set up an account on Patreon, the then-new site that let fans directly support and give money to their favorite creators. More than 4,000 people eventually signed up to support the channel, adding up to $7,310 per video. Since then, other essayists have set up their own Patreons, and some have started making sponsored videos to pay the bills as well.

In three years, Zhou and Ramos made 28 videos for their channel. They dived deep into Michael Bay's unique "Bayhem" directing style, explained what makes Edgar Wright so much funnier than other directors, and looked at how Martin Scorsese uses silence to such great effect in his films. But my favorite Every Frame a Painting video is titled "David Fincher—And the Other Way is Wrong." Zhou, the narrator for all the duo's videos, spends seven minutes and 28 seconds looking at how Fincher, director of The Social Network and Seven and Zodiac and so many other great movies, uses the camera in his movies. His use of a rock-steady camera to communicate omniscience and destiny; the way he moves the camera to subtly explain the nature of a relationship or expose new information; the way he uses, and doesn't use, close-up shots. I've loved Fincher films forever, but in seven minutes, Zhou taught me how to watch the movies in an entirely new and more sophisticated way.

As of December, Every Frame a Painting is no longer. Ramos and Zhou got busy with other work, and couldn't figure out how to keep doing what they wanted within the confines of both their channel and YouTube's systems. So they spent six months trying to figure out how to make a goodbye video, before just putting their final script on Medium for everyone to read. "When we started this YouTube project," Ramos was supposed to say in the script, "we gave ourselves one simple rule: If we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them. And one day, we woke up and felt it was time."

New School

Luckily for fans of the YouTube Film School, Every Frame a Painting inspired a lot of other people to put their own spin on the film essay. There seems to be an archetype: film school veterans, usually men, who either work in or have been disillusioned by the film industry (and sometimes both). They tend to have the vocabulary and eye for the nuances of filmmaking. They also like the process of creating and editing, and see YouTube as a way to explore their own questions in public. "It's in the construction of a video that I understand and learn the most," says Evan Puschak, who runs a popular channel called Nerdwriter that contains essays about everything from why The Prisoner of Azkaban is the best Harry Potter movie to a deep dissection of Donald Trump's speech patterns. "I just move toward what interests me in that week, or that month."