Film Analysis Channel Every Frame A Painting Has Officially Shut Down

A channel loved by film buffs has ceased production.

Every Frame A Painting, which featured analysis of auteur directors and criticism related to filmmaking techniques, has been officially shuttered by its co-creators more than a year after it post its last video.

The two movie nerds behind Every Frame A Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos, announced the shutdown of their channel in a blog post Zhou shared via Medium. While several factors contributed to the channel’s demise, the ultimate rationale for its discontinuation is a simple one: Its hosts no longer have the proper passion for their shared project. “In the past year, we’ve both started new jobs and taken on other freelance work,” wrote Ramos in the Medium post. “Things started piling up and it took all our energy to get through the work we’d agreed to do. When we started this YouTube project, we gave ourselves one simple rule: if we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them. And one day, we woke up and felt it was time.”

First launched in 2014, Every Frame A Painting gathered fans with its acute and detailed video essays on filmic topics. Zhou and Ramos used clear voices and cogent writing to distill the technique and artistry of the masters into bite-sized episodes. Their most popular clip, from 2014, analyzed Jackie Chan’s action-comedy hybrids.

As their channel continued on, Zhou and Ramos were burdened with the significant expenses their video essays accrued. While they supplemented their income via Patreon and had more than 1.3 million subscribers by the end of their run, they still struggled to break even. They also found themselves tangled in the particulars of YouTube’s Content ID system, which prevented them from repurposing long shots from the films they wished to analyze. The final Every Frame A Painting episode, which discusses the music of Marvel movies, was uploaded in October 2016.

The demise of Every Frame A Painting is unfortunate, though film buffs can at least take solace in the fact that the channel’s archive will remain active. If you hunger for more content of this type, you can check out the other YouTubers who offer analyses of the silver screen.