essay

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.

A video essay from Every Frame a Painting about Vancouver, a major film production city that almost never appears onscreen as itself. It shows clips of films and TV shot there that pass the city off as somewhere else.

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.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay analysing how Edgar Wright creates visual comedy through framing, camera movement, editing, sound effects and music.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Buster Keaton's visual comedy, examining how he built and framed his gags. It uses clips from his silent films to show the thinking behind them.

A video essay from Every Frame a Painting on animator Satoshi Kon and his editing style, which distorts and warps space and time. It draws on his four features and one TV series.

A video essay on how the editors of Star Wars: A New Hope recut and rearranged the footage to rescue the film. It walks through specific changes that improved pacing and drama.

Every Frame a Painting analyzes how Jackie Chan stages action comedy, with nine principles such as starting from a disadvantage, using the environment, clear shots, and keeping action and reaction in the same frame.

A video essay explaining hauntology, Mark Fisher's idea of lost futures, and 80s nostalgia. It uses the Fallout games and other media as examples of a retro-futurism that mourns futures that never arrived.

Game Maker's Toolkit examines Nintendo's design approach of starting from a core play mechanic, making it fun, and building around it. Examples include Mario's jump and Luigi's Mansion's vacuum.

VFX supervisor Jonas Ussing examines what studios mean by "no CGI", showing how much invisible CGI hides behind practical-effects marketing. It is the first part of a multi-part series that includes analysis of doctored behind-the-scenes footage.

The first episode of a Cities: Skylines series on urban politics and planning, focused on parking. It uses the game to show how parking minimums shape cities, drawing on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

SalC1 explains how the seed behind the Minecraft title screen panorama was found, using community effort and the Minecraft@Home project. It covers the search through Beta 1.7.3 world seeds.

3kliksphilip summarizes Valve's GDC talk on VACNet, a deep-learning system that flags CS:GO cheaters and feeds the Overwatch review queue. It covers Trust Factor, VAC, and how the data is collected and analyzed.

Insider explains how The Mandalorian replaced green screens with LED walls that project real-time 3D environments behind actors, with over half the show filmed on such virtual sets.

aGameScout explains rolling, the third major NES Tetris playstyle, in which players tap the back of the controller to move pieces faster than hypertapping. It covers how the technique works and where it comes from.

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

A short film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute adapting Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, showing how no one person knows how to make a pencil and how many people cooperate without central planning.

Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix series, using Apple and the iPhone to show how invention builds on copying and combining prior ideas. It argues that creativity and innovation are inseparable from copying.

A School of Life video arguing that everyone marries someone who is somewhat wrong for them, and that this is unavoidable. It is a four-minute version of an essay by Alain de Botton.

CGP Grey argues that aging and death are a problem worth defeating, using a short animated essay. It is part of a pair with a follow-up from Kurzgesagt.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.