Every Frame a Painting
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2015–2025
8:42 · 3.3M views · Jul 3, 2014
An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Michael Bay's style, 'Bayhem', covering his camera movement, composition, color and editing. It argues that even if you dislike his films, they teach something about visual perception.
HN recommends it as a short, well-produced and eye-opening piece of film analysis.
5 comments from Hacker News
Everything on screen matters. Modern Cinema is a HIGHLY evolved art form. If you have any interest in this at all, YouTube user Every Frame A Painting publishes, short, easily digestible, and well-produced YouTube videos about this stuff that are eye-opening. Here are a few of my favorites: Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy: [LINK] The Silence of the Lambs - Who Wins the Scene? [LINK] Michael Bay - What is Bayhem? this video
That's fair, but being able to understand and direct the popular zeitgeist, be it by instinct or intellect, is a very formidable gift indeed. It's something almost none of us can do (certainly myself included), and those who can will always have detractors. I don't see success as a zero sum game, so I'm happy for people who are successful, even if I wish I had their insight. Total aside, you should check this out when you have time, pretty interesting analysis: this video
> Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts An excellent episode of Every Frame A Painting is "Michael Bay --- What is Bayhem?" It explains in detail in what way those particular movies are poorly made. this video
I think the main issue with Prezi-style presentations is that it demands too much skill to use properly. A better interface with sensible defaults and much less emphasis on wow-factor would help a lot here. Normal powerpoint "only" requires a basic awareness of composition and narrative coherence, which already is too much to ask in practice. To make good Prezi presentation you need to have the skills of a cinematographer/editor. Specifically, the skill of continuity editing[0] so your audience can follow what is going on. What we want is the calm, easy to read compositions of, say, Yasujirō Ozu or Wes Anderson, and Akira Kurasowa's sense of movement[1][2]. Instead everyone uses it in a way that it feels more like the worst aspects of Bayhem[3]. I still believe Prezi-like presentation tools have the potential to be good, because they could be used to map relationships in your narrative to spatial relationships. But that would require a) that you are aware of those relationships yourself and b) that you posses the skills to translate that into spatial compositions that are coherent. This is obviously an unrealistic demand, so instead the tools should assist you with that. It needs is an interface that helps users structure their story, with sensible default conversions. Maybe something like Treesheets[4], where you can create a tree-based hierarchy in your topics, and then a conversion of that to a spatial hierarchy that is easy to follow, and not a distraction from the actual
I mean, complaining about the color realism of a film with gigantic monster dinosaurs (whose coloration we may never know to begin with) seems a bit silly. Movies are not documentaries. I'd buy in a bit more for things like the BBC's 'Planet Earth' needing color realism, but even then it's ok to dramatize things. Every Frame a Painting goes over Michael Bay's work and includes some color content he uses and WHY: this video