Film School in Six Minutes

In his series of videos Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhougoes deep into the craft of filmmaking. Zhou dissects techniques — including lateral tracking shots, dramatic silence, matching cuts — with examples from filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Edgar Wright, and Bong Joon-ho. It’s basically like taking a filmmaking course from a very funny, slightly profane professor. And even if you just like watching movies and want to know more about how they’re made, you’re in for a treat.

Here, he looks at the ways Scorsese deploys silence in movies from Taxi Driver to The Wolf of Wall Street. Why should I watch a six minute video about silence, you ask? Trust me, Zhou makes it riveting.

In this one, Zhou shows how the director Bart Layton uses camera position and eye contact in his 2012 documentary The Impostor to draw you into a con-artist’s game.

This one is abouthow director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End) uses a whole range of visual comic techniques that have fallen into disuse in the highly verbal comedy of the Apatow school.

But Zhou doesn’t restrict himself to auteurs. Here, he takes a serious look at one of the most derided filmmakers working today, Michael Bay. “What is Bayhem?” Zhou asks. “It’s the use of movement, composition, and fast editing to create a sense of epic scale.”