Every Frame a Painting is a series of video essays about film form, editing, and cinematography created by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou between 2014 and 2016, published on YouTube and Vimeo. The series is considered a pioneer of film criticism on YouTube, and has been praised by several filmmakers. The series was revived in a limited series in 2024, alongside a short film by Ramos and Zhou.

Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou created Every Frame a Painting after facing difficulties in their professional careers of "communicating visual ideas to non-visual people"; Ramos is an animator and Zhou a film editor.^[1] Around March 2013, Zhou often found himself identifying film techniques, which he believed would make for effective video essays. About a year later, after Zhou complained about his work, Ramos told him to pour his creative energy into a new video series, which prompted him to start writing.^[1][2] For each essay, Zhou wrote and researched, Ramos organized the thesis and made animations, and they both worked on the final editing process.^[2] Zhou narrated each video, opening with his signature line, "Hi, my name is Tony and this is Every Frame a Painting ".^[1]

The first video was published on April 16, 2014, about Bong Joon-ho's Mother and the use of side-on profile shots.^[3] Ramos and Zhou forwent traditional commercial sponsorships and funded the series with viewer support on Patreon.^[1] The final essay of the original run was published on September 12, 2016, about the use of orchestral sound in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.^[4] Ramos and Zhou published the script of the final, unproduced essay on Medium on December 2, 2017, as both a farewell and explanation for the series' end, as well as a postmortem with advice for future essayists.^[2] They felt the channel's increased audience and YouTube's copyright policies limited their creative freedom.^[1] Following this, Ramos and Zhou produced video essays released as special features for the Criterion Collection and FilmStruck.^[2][5] They also wrote the introduction to the artbook The Wes Anderson Collection: Isle of Dogs (2018),^[6] and wrote, produced, directed, and narrated several episodes of Netflix's video essay series Voir (2021).^[7][8]

Ramos and Zhou's short film—The Second, starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee—premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 20, 2024.^[9] A limited series of new video essays is set to release on Every Frame a Painting in preparation for the film's release; the first was released on August 26.^[10][11]

Each Every Frame a Painting essay explores one particular topic, often a single creator, with many organized around a scene that illustrates the idea.^[2] The editing style, use of film clips, and remixing of audio were developed in response to YouTube's Content ID system, with the goal of meeting the criteria for fair use and to avoid being flagged by the copyright violation algorithm.^[2][12] Zhou lamented that the format imposed by Content ID prevented them from making videos about filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Agnès Varda, as they would require longer clips.^[2][13] He experimented with private uploads to test YouTube's Content ID system.^[1]

Kevin B. Lee, a film critic and video essayist, called the series "the standout newcomer to the video essay scene" in 2014.^[42] Many critics point to the essay on Jackie Chan and action comedy film as among the best.^[43][44] Wired's Brian Raftery credited Every Frame a Painting for kicking off "a dramatic growth spurt" in YouTube-based movie criticism and stated the channel's "astute, patient, visually assured film essays...help[ed] push the medium past its ranting-rando-with-a-camera phase".^[45] Allison de Fren called the series "a master class on film form" with consistent style and tone; she found Zhou's "chummy, upbeat performance" a stark contrast to previous essays such as Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004).^[1]

Filmmakers such as Christopher McQuarrie, Seth Rogen, and Edgar Wright have given praise to Every Frame a Painting's essays.^[46][47][48] Mark Mothersbaugh said Every Frame a Painting's video essay on "unmemorable" Marvel Cinematic Universe scores directly influenced his composition of Thor: Ragnarok's score to be different from previous Marvel films.^[49][50]

• Film editor
• Supercut
• Cinephilia

• YouTube channel
• Tony Zhou's Vimeo channel