S7 E1 • The Kuleshov Effect

Clickbait title: This One Weird Trick Is The Reason Movies Even Work There's something cathartic about drilling all the way down to the fundamentals. Not just the basic techniques, but the actual fundamentals, the bedrock of how something even functions in the first place, the reason why a series of edits can be used to tell a story rather than simply turning into abstract mush. It's also surprisingly challenging, like explaining what hands are.

Première diffusion : 14 janvier 2017

S7 E2 • Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda

Clickbait title: Nazis hate him! Secrets of propaganda exposed! This took far longer to put together than I'd anticipated. It wasn't even the work itself, it's the emotional load. I eventually had to start chopping out huge planned segments, like looking at modern propaganda like that awful "Surfing in the DPRK" white guy rap video. I'm sorry about the downer ending, but there's no way to spruce it up. To a certain degree we lost. You should seriously read, and then re-read, Umberto Eco's'Ur-Fascism'. It's available online for free. It's not that long. Here, I'll even link it for you. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

Première diffusion : 10 février 2017

S7 E3 • The Morality of Shadow of the Colossus

Clickbait title: This video will restore your faith in the entombed god Dormin Shadow of the Colossus is a rare masterpiece of a game. The occasional janky controls and wonky physics aside, every element of this game holds up incredibly well. More than that, it's about the overall package just coming together in a cohesive and synergistic way, the mechanics of the game complimenting and reenforcing the themes and story. Probably the biggest reason we haven't seen a repeat is because it's less about a boss rush where you climb all over big monsters and more about the total package, and getting it right. Though it is also about the boss rush. The technological side of SotC is still daunting, and I'm sure plenty of game developers out there re-play it and go "wait, how did they do that?" Last word: the beginning of the fight with Avion, when Wander transfers from the ground to Avion's wing, is one of the purest moments in video game history.

Première diffusion : 28 février 2017

S7 E4 • Language of Editing: Basic Cuts

Clickbait title: This editor describes basic vocabulary and you won't believe what happens next! Filmmakers are actually really awful when it comes to vocabulary, re-using words randomly, basically describing anything with whatever word feels right at the time. A gobo is a cucalorus, also called a cookie, that has a focusing mechanism, but a gobo is also a kind of motor, and that motor might be attached to a gobo, or it might be attached to the fixture itself, and by the transitive properties of metonyms you end up with a gobo gobo with a gobo on its gobo. I've seen 'parallel cut' used at least three different ways in various textbooks and glossaries. This isn't me claiming that I've got the definitive take on all of these terms, just that, you know, if you heard a term used a different way to describe a different thing chances are you're right, you have and you did, because it's a mess and we're all faking it.

Première diffusion : 4 mars 2017

S7 E5 • Setup and Payoff

Clickbait title: hack writers hate him! One weird trick to improving your screenplays! My friend Lindsay recently did a video on this subject looking at Mad Max: Fury Road talking about this same subject (though she uses the term 'planting and payoff'; both are equally valid, though I'll admit that 'planting and payoff' has a wonderful alliterative quality to it versus 'setup and payoff') and I'll admit that I was a bit chapped, like I'd been beaten to the punch on a great idea. But that's the thing: not only was it a great idea it was also an obvious one. Anyone with a trained eye came away from Fury Road blown away by the almost perfect efficiency of the story in managing the establishment and use of every single prop, from the guns planted around the war rig to the steering wheel to the bolt cutters to the boot and the blood and the bullets. It's a really good video and you should go watch it, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLLGN7zv-3k

Première diffusion : 12 mars 2017

S7 E6 • VidMe or Why Platforms Aren't Your Friends

Clickbait title: Get Paid 60k Per Year With This One Online Trick! Blip.tv also positioned itself as "just pals" but that idea of "we'll let the users guide our growth" was a paper mask hiding a lack of core vision. They would make a lot of promises and did a lot of posturing vis a vis supporting creators and helping them develop content, but in the end Blip's business model was "get bought by someone bigger." That kind of worked out for them as they were bought by Maker Studios who were, themselves, in the business of getting themselves bought by someone bigger. So Maker buys Blip so Disney will buy Maker, opens Maker.tv as a hypothetical curated database clone-and-re-skin of Blip, but closes the whole thing within 18 months without ever actually re-launching the Blip creators they went out of their way to retain in the merger. As it turned out they had no real interest in developing content when they could just skim ad revenue off the 50,000 channels that fell below payment thresholds, and withhold payment en masse in order to milk the interest on the payroll account.

Première diffusion : 15 juin 2017

S7 E7 • Vlogs and the Hyperreal

Clickbait Title: Warning Don't Use Dialectic Analysis Before You See This While meta-discussion of YouTube is hardly lacking, I think there's a lot of room for more serious analysis of YouTube as a broad subject and all the myriad subcultures in specific. Every time I've attended VidCon I've been as surprised by the subcultures that are represented as I have by the ones that are absent. I think it would be utterly fascinating to see an ASMR panel at VidCon 2018, to hear a bunch of ASMR creators talk shop about the specific nuances of their genre, the common needs and wants of their audience, what makes a successful channel, and how the genre is evolving. The other day I saw a five hour long, multi-part ASMR choose your own adventure. you always think you have a handle on what's out there, until you realize you really don't.

Première diffusion : 6 juillet 2017

S7 E8 • Why The Jump Cut Is Here To Stay

Clickbait Title: You've Never Seen Barthes and Saussure Like THIS Before I thought to myself "hey, this one's going to be a snap, you can just shoot it once and be done, you'll crank this out so fast!" and then I went and cooked up a whole bunch of intricate gags and cuts and segments that required multiple setups and/or doing things in a style that I've never done before, one of which involved driving to a riverside park half way across the city b/c I really dig the bridge. Miraculously I only suffered a couple bug bites while I was wandering around down there, and all of them have, at this point, stopped itching. The absolutely manic delivery of that bit at the end isn't entirely intentional, it's just what felt right.

Première diffusion : 12 juillet 2017

S7 E9 • Ludonarrative Dissonance

Clickbait Title: this happened to me ~~~~pseudo-intellectual nonsense~~~~ STORYTIME #SocialExperiment When I teased this video the initial reaction was a near-unanimous slow-motion "oh no," like a comedy action hero leaping on a grenade that's revealed to be a dud or a prop or it was actually just a bagel. I'm not saying this looks like a grenade, but is really just a bagel, but I am saying that I find the tepid anti-intellectualism that has become calcified in video game circles to be exhausting. It's reached a point where so many intelligent, engaged people are on the brink of giving up entirely because any attempt to improve the language we use to talk about games as they exist and operate is met with suspicion and mockery, painted as little more than bloviating wankery, and trotted around like Quasimodo as a target for rotten turnips. Ludonarrative dissonance has earned a reputation not through any irreparable flaws in the concept, but because pundits catering to an anti-intellectual base coined stupid names like "ludonarrative disco biscuits" because pretending big words are hard is a sure way to get a laugh from the worst kinds of people.

Première diffusion : 20 juillet 2017

S7 E10 • The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play

Clickbait title: Watch These Hot Games Intentionally Misbehave The cough hasn't gotten any better. If anything it's worse now. I had to stop and hack a good, rumbling cough for a solid few seconds every other line. I wouldn't be surprised if

Première diffusion : 26 juillet 2017

S7 E11 • Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm

Clickbait Title: Video Criticism YouTube Exploitation Meta Commentary Pregnant Algorithm Educational Spam Fidget Spinner Buried Alive For Kids Very late in the process of making this I decided to change the name, largely because the moment I made the original title "YouTube and the Business of Exploiting Children" public in a promotional Tweet I realized that there was an entire constellation of related issues that I wanted to talk about. From channels that exist to get kids hooked on gambling to parents subjecting their children to abusive conditions as "pranks", there's a lot of shady stuff going on. In that context, weird spam and unsettling videos about poop didn't rank high enough to warrant burning a title that good.

Première diffusion : 22 novembre 2017