PART IV: UNACKNOWLEDGED TRUTHS

We feel there are a lot of misconceptions or ideas that people believe about making stuff on the Internet. Here’s the truth, as we see it.

10(TAYLOR)

Work with a partner

There’s a common myth in the arts — the lone genius, usually a man, creating everything by himself. For the most part, neither of us has found it to be completely true. Look up most cases of a lone genius, and you’ll find a footnote about some unacknowledged helper.

Here’s how we work: Tony usually researches, writes and edits alone. But I do everything else: I edit every draft, watch every version, watch all the clips, do the flash cards, and build the thesis. I am the first and last audience that sees everything before it goes out. And the closest description we’ve ever come up with is that he is the editor, and I am the editor’s editor.

If you look at the picture below, you’ll see Tony edited version 1 of the Chuck Jones video by himself. Then we worked together for 7 days to create version 7 (the final). The yellow boxes are the only parts that stayed the same, and even those sections got moved around.

A fair example of Tony’s first draft of the edit vs our mutual final draft

But most of all throughout this process, I’m a sounding board. Tony and I often build a thesis by arguing the points with each other. Except for a handful of videos, that has basically been our process for three years. We’re not saying that this system will work for everyone, but having two sets of eyes has worked really well for us.

11 (TONY)

There is no such thing as free content on the Internet

Everything costs something to make. If a person is putting out content for free, that means they’re not getting paid for their time.

Video essays cost money to make. There’s the cost of the research, the writing, the assembling of materials, the editing. It adds up to hours and hours of work for something that takes minutes to consume. My average just for editing (not anything else) is about 8 hours of editing for every 1 minute of video essay. So the 9-minute Jackie Chan video was around 72 hours of editing. It was probably at least double for research and writing.

Probably around 200 hours of work. Still a favorite, though.

With Patreon donations, Every Frame a Painting was eventually able to break even. But from April 2014 until December 2015, we were making video essays at a loss. We were never in danger of not making the rent, but it got pretty financially stressful on several occasions.

12(TONY)

Nobody can cheat the triangle

Everyone who works in filmmaking knows the triangle: Faster, Cheaper, Better. Pick two. A film can be made fast and cheap, but it won’t be good. Or you can make it fast and good, but it won’t be cheap. Or it can be cheap and good, but it won’t happen fast.

The famous triangle/Venn diagram

Every Frame a Painting was made after we came home from our day jobs and paid our bills. That kept it cheap. We also tried really hard to make it good. Which ultimately meant we had to sacrifice “fast.”

The big danger for future video essayists is that large websites have started moving away from the written word and towards video, which is completely unsustainable. Video is just too expensive and time-consuming to make.

All of this is accurate

(TAYLOR) Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, nobody can cheat this triangle. And sooner or later, all of these large sites will bleed money, at which point some executive will say “We need to make our content both faster AND cheaper!”

This is why we encourage every person who wants to make something on the Internet to understand the value of independence. This is not about artistic integrity or even money. We kept Every Frame a Painting independent because as long as we could control this triangle, we could control the end result.

We didn’t care about cheap or fast, we cared about it being good. If we found a company willing to pay for it to happen fast, we’d work fast (full disclosure: we eventually found two, Criterion and FilmStruck). If nobody was willing to pay, then we worked slow.

But if we sold the channel to another company, or partnered with some network, then we would no longer control the triangle. And guess which of these three things would get sacrificed first?

13(TONY)

Know thyself and thy audience

Nothing really prepares you for the experience of suddenly having “an audience” on the Internet. The experience is different for every person, but I suspect the two major feelings are the same: there’s that initial dopamine rush of “Oh my God somebody likes me” followed by that creeping fear of “I better not fuck this up.”

George Orwell has this great quote:

What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.

The Internet, and YouTube in particular, is a massive echo chamber of people asking you to write the same book over and over again. For your own sanity, you need to keep those voices at arm’s length. But because of that combination of dopamine and fear, it seems as though a lot of people end up leaning into what the audience wants.

We’re not asking you to ignore the audience completely; it’s more about setting clear boundaries between you and them.

My belief is that if you give the audience exactly what they ask for every time, they will probably enjoy it, but on some level they’ll lose respect for you. Hell, you’ll lose respect for yourself.

This tweet, however, did make me very happy. Baby, I got a stew.

(TAYLOR) And I believe that there is a balance that can be found, but you and the audience should be equally as passionate about the idea. The key is nuance.

So with Every Frame a Painting, we made it clear that we would not accept requests; we came up with all the ideas and set up boundaries. Not everybody needs to set the same boundaries we did, but you need to have something.

14(TAYLOR)

Success can be scarier than failure

The idea of failure is always scary. Nobody wants to fail, especially not in front of other people. But this script you’re reading is a failure.

The reason we‘re putting it out there isn’t as an act of bravery or anything; we just wanted to be honest. Failure is a fact of life — certainly a fact of any life in the arts. It’s the only way we’ve ever learned anything.

(TONY) For us, Every Frame a Painting ended up being both a personal and a professional success. But over time, I felt trapped by what we’d created — and also trapped by that success.

Every time I mentioned some film, I’d hear, “are you gonna make a video about it?” Every time I started writing something, even for my own amusement, a voice in the back of my head would say “how do I make this accessible to my audience?” I stopped experimenting in my editing, mostly because it was too far outside the margins of what I was making on YouTube.

It wasn’t even fun making jokes on Twitter anymore, because they got taken at face value:

Reaction to a joke I made on Twitter

I’d been a working video editor since I was 19 years old. I’d spent three years of my personal time editing video essays. And now I could barely stand to look at my own work. Eventually, the solution became clear: go do something else.

(TAYLOR) Whenever Tony got really down like this, I would remind him of a clip that we both love, from the Studio Ghibli documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.” It’s a moment when Hayao Miyazaki is trying to draw a specific airplane. And for some reason, he cannot do it.

From “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2014)

For days and days, he keeps trying to draw this plane, but nothing meets his satisfaction. Eventually, he realizes that he’s spent too much time on it. So he hands the plane off to another animator, and he moves on to something else.

For me and for Tony, this clip is extremely reassuring. If Miyazaki — the world’s greatest living animator — can admit defeat after trying his best, then it’s okay for everyone else. If he can let go, then so can we.