Every Frame a Painting Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sustained Two-Shot Vanished from Movies

Video essay­ists don’t nor­mal­ly retire; in most cas­es, they just drift into inac­tiv­i­ty. Hence the sur­prise and even dis­may of the inter­net’s cinephiles when Tony Zhou and Tay­lor Ramos declared the end of their respect­ed chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing in 2016. We here at Open Cul­ture had fea­tured their analy­ses of every­thing from the work of auteurs like Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Michael Bay to how clas­si­cal art inspired cel­e­brat­ed shots to the thoughts and feel­ings of edi­tors to the use of Van­cou­ver in film. Now, near­ly eight years after their last such video essay, Zhou and Ramos have returned to YouTube.

The new Every Frame a Paint­ing video explains the tech­nique of the sus­tained two-shot, and, as IndieWire’s Sarah Shachat writes, “charts — in under six min­utes — the tech­no­log­i­cal and indus­tri­al trends that have put it more or less in favor with film­mak­ers and its util­i­ty in con­tem­po­rary film­mak­ing as a show­case for two actors’ chem­istry. This is stan­dard. Zhou, who nar­rates the series, still can’t avoid feel­ing like an unseen char­ac­ter with­in the essay and also the film school TA we all wish we had.” What’s more, it incor­po­rates footage from Zhou and Ramos’ own short film “The Sec­ond” to more direct­ly approach the film­mak­ing chal­lenge of “need­ing to change cov­er­age plans for an out­door scene when you’re los­ing the light.”

As implied by its name, a two-shot con­tains two actors, and a sus­tained two-shot con­tin­ues unbro­ken for the length of a dia­logue between them. We don’t see so many of them in recent pic­tures, Zhou explains, because they were cre­at­ed in a time when “film was expen­sive, so it encour­aged film­mak­ers to rehearse more and con­serve their takes.” Now, “dig­i­tal is cheap­er, so peo­ple don’t real­ly pick one angle and shoot it; they cov­er a scene from as many angles as pos­si­ble,” recon­struct­ing it out of bits and pieces in the edit­ing room. Act­ing styles have also changed since the old-Hol­ly­wood days, with all their “ges­tur­ing and mov­ing around” that increased the two-shot’s visu­al inter­est.

Yet today’s film­mak­ers ignore the pow­er of this dis­used form at their per­il: “The sus­tained two-shot is the com­po­si­tion that best allows two per­form­ers to play off each oth­er, and try as you might, you can­not repli­cate this feel­ing with edit­ing.” And indeed, it’s only one of the effec­tive ele­ments of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry film that have only become more dif­fi­cult to repli­cate amid the prac­ti­cal­ly end­less array of options afford­ed by dig­i­tal tools and media. One hopes that Zhou and Ramos will cov­er a vari­ety of them in Every Frame a Paint­ing’s lim­it­ed-run come­back — and even more so, that they’ll put them to good use in their own nar­ra­tive film­mak­ing careers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

How the Coen Broth­ers Put Their Remark­able Stamp on the “Shot Reverse Shot,” the Fun­da­men­tal Cin­e­mat­ic Tech­nique

The Most Beau­ti­ful Shots in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Films

A Salute to Every Frame a Paint­ing: Watch All 28 Episodes of the Fine­ly Craft­ed (and Now Con­clud­ed) Video Essay Series on Cin­e­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.