Tony Zhou AMA

Just a brilliant AMA with Tony Zhou, famous for his Every Frame a Painting video essay series.

Hi Tony,

I'm trying to understand better the differences that editing makes in film versus the actual directing. 

Could you give any specific examples of films/scenes that you thought were bad, but COULD have been good with better editing? And explain what you'd do differently?

Thanks!

[–]tonyszhou[S] 74 points 20 days ago 

Sam O'Steen once said that the only movies that were "saved" in the editing suite were also ruined there in the first place. I kinda agree with that.

There are some crazy shoulda-been-masterpieces like The Lady from Shanghai where you can see the moment some studio boss said "This movie's too weird. Cut that out!" In these movies, those lost scenes are like phantom limbs. You intrinsically feel something should be there, but they aren't.

As for bad, my big famous example would be the second-to-last scene from Psycho, where the psychiatrist explains everything. It's a product of its time, and it requires a character to tell the audience what's going on. There's a similar moment in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island where one character whips out a chalkboard to explain the movie to somebody else. On the one hand, I get why that scene's there. On the other hand, I'm curious as to what the movie would be like if you removed that scene.

When asked how he comes up with the ideas for his video essays, Zhou writes:

As for how to notice this stuff I totally recommend (in rough order):

1) Take a class on script analysis. Learn how a director breaks down a script. Then get your hands on a movie script, pick a scene, guess how the director would shoot it, then watch the actual way he/she shot it.

2) Bring a film into Final Cut or Premiere or Avid, and just watch it backwards and forwards, muted and unmuted, B&W, color. Watch for camera placement, movement, everything. After you do this for a while, you won't need to bring the movie into Premiere, you can just do it on the fly.

3) If you've seen the film before, watch it with an audience and kinda watch them. Their "on-the-fly" reaction to the film will teach you more than many critics. When do they lean in? When do they cross their arms? When do they laugh? Is it at the same place you laughed?

My first editing instructor told me to watch things played in reverse as well. Removing the distraction of following a linear plot can bring formal elements to the foreground.

Such a fantastic AMA...just one more:

I think this is a huge problem in filmmaking today too: the myth of the perfect first feature.

I am going to (at some point) make a video essay called "Everybody Used to Suck" comprised entirely of footage from everyone's earliest directorial work.

Scorsese's first feature was actually called Bring On the Dancing Girls and it bombed so bad at NYFF that he didn't do anything for a few years, before repurposing it into Who's That Knocking. Tarantino never finished his first feature, My Best Friend's Birthday. Kubrick hated Fear and Desire so much he destroyed every copy. The list goes on and on, but the myth of the "first feature" is exactly that: a myth. Everybody used to suck, it's just that everybody also hides their earliest work from the public.

If you've never watched one of Zhou's video essays, you can start with any of them, but I suggest his latest on Jackie Chan and the art of action comedy. Chan is so underrated in so many ways, and Zhou takes a highlighter to each of them.

Search zeitgeist, sex edition

This piece analyzing data on how people use Google to search for topics related to sex is a fun tour of the submerged portion of the human psyche.

Of particular interest to me was this:

Women also show a great deal of insecurity about their behinds, although many women have recently flip-flopped on what it is they don’t like about them.

In 2004, in some parts of the United States, the most common search regarding changing one’s butt was how to make it smaller. The desire to make one’s bottom bigger was overwhelmingly concentrated in areas with large black populations. Beginning in 2010, however, the desire for bigger butts grew in the rest of the United States. This interest has tripled in four years. In 2014, there were more searches asking how to make your butt bigger than smaller in every state. These days, for every five searches looking into breast implants in the United States, there is one looking into butt implants.

Does women’s growing preference for a larger behind match men’s preferences? Interestingly, yes. “Big butt porn” searches, which also used to be concentrated in black communities, have recently shot up in popularity throughout the United States.

In a recent post, I wondered what factors drove the frequent shifts in the ideal female body? Are women driving the change or are they reacting to male preferences? And what part of the change has roots in culture rather than evolution?

More and more, I suspect the cultural impact to be significant. If female bodies were purely evolutionary signals of physical fitness, the ideal shouldn't change so frequently decade to decade.

ESPN Draft Rankings altered after the fact?

According to this Reddit thread, Chad Ford's NBA draft rankings in recent years have been changed after the fact to make the rankings seem more favorable based on actual NBA performance of the draftees.

Looks like Chad Ford changes his draft boards after the fact to make himself look better. Take the 2013 draft board for instance.

Here's a cache of the page a month after the draft: https://web.archive.org/web/20130729144022/http://insider.espn.go.com/nbadraft/results/top100/_/year/2013

And here it is now: http://insider.espn.go.com/nbadraft/results/top100/_/year/2013/

Notice how he's raised players that have done well (Antetokounmpo, Carter-Williams, Hardaway Jr., Dieng, Gobert) and dropped those who haven't done so well (Karasev, Larkin, Jamaal Franklin).

Kinda shady I think.

After this story got a bit of play, ESPN reverted Chad Ford's rankings back to their original state. Ford claims he didn't make the alterations, and ESPN issued a statement saying they believe him. My guess: some poor, blameless CMS will take the brunt of the scapegoating.

Given enough eyeballs, all ex post facto malarkey is shallow.

What do you know?

INTERVIEWER

Would you say that drawing from one’s own experience and background is always good—or even necessary?

HANEKE

I’ve never seen good results from people trying to speak about things they don’t know firsthand. They will talk about Afghanistan, about children in Africa, but in the end they only know what they’ve seen on TV or read in the newspaper. And yet they pretend—even to themselves—that they know what they’re saying. But that’s bullshit. I’m quite convinced that I don’t know anything except for what is going on around me, what I can see and perceive every day, and what I have experienced in my life so far. These are the only things I can rely on. Anything else is merely the pretense of knowledge with no depth. Of course, I don’t just write about things precisely as they have happened to me—some have and some haven’t. But at least I try to invent stories with which I can personally identify.

My students, meanwhile, pitch only the gravest of topics. For them it’s always got to be the Holocaust. I usually tell them, Back off. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can only reproduce what you read or heard elsewhere. Others who actually lived through it have said it much better than you ever could. Try to create something that springs organically from your own experience. For only then does it stand the slightest chance of being genuinely interesting. Incidentally, this is also why in our day and age the movies coming out of the developing countries are much more interesting than our own. These films portray an authentic experience, and they do so with real passion, while we, the viewers, only know of these things second- or thirdhand. And yet, we can feel when something is real—as a viewer, you can feel the pleasure or despair of a certain scene. We, in our protected little worlds, are much more numb because we are in luck not to experience danger on a daily basis. But that’s precisely why the film industry in the so-called first world is in such a rut. There is just so much recycling. We don’t have the capability to represent authentic experiences because there is so little we do experience. At the most basic level, all we’re concerned about here are our material possessions and sexual urges. There really isn’t much more to our lives.

From a Michael Haneke interview in The Paris Review.

How spin becomes gospel

How and why do so many health myths transform into everyday wisdom? Perhaps because academic press releases are exaggerated or misrepresented when they're written up in news stories.

The goal of a press release around a scientific study is to draw attention from the media, and that attention is supposed to be good for the university, and for the scientists who did the work. Ideally the endpoint of that press release would be the simple spread of seeds of knowledge and wisdom; but it's about attention and prestige and, thereby, money. Major universities employ publicists who work full time to make scientific studies sound engaging and amazing. Those publicists email the press releases to people like me, asking me to cover the story because "my readers" will "love it." And I want to write about health research and help people experience "love" for things. I do!  

Across 668 news stories about health science, the Cardiff researchers compared the original academic papers to their news reports. They counted exaggeration and distortion as any instance of implying causation when there was only correlation, implying meaning to humans when the study was only in animals, or giving direct advice about health behavior that was not present in the study. They found evidence of exaggeration in 58 to 86 percent of stories when the press release contained similar exaggeration. When the press release was staid and made no such errors, the rates of exaggeration in the news stories dropped to between 10 and 18 percent.

Even the degree of exaggeration between press releases and news stories was broadly similar.

One golden rule: never believe a press release.

Of course, since most research papers I encounter online are behind a paywall, it's difficult to compare them to the news stories representing them. Why are so many research papers paywalled? I can't imagine the revenue to be more than a trifle so why not just let more eyeballs at it to amplify one's fame instead? Perhaps someone with more knowledge of that world can explain the economics.