I’ve had a pitiful number of blog posts since December 5, 2017. 11 to be exact. This will be the 12th.

Why do I reference that particular date? Well, it was the date I wrote a post about the “death” of one of my favorite video essay YouTube channels, Every Frame a Painting.

In that post I linked to their Postmortem for the channel. “Every Frame a Painting is officially dead”, it read, while reassuring us that all the videos would remain available on their channel. Their explanation for not creating more videos was fairly simple. “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.”

I’m reminded of a scene early on in the film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where one of the characters (slung over the back of John Cleese) claims “I’m not dead”, before being clubbed to death and tossed on “the [dead] cart”. Ok. Gruesome, I admit. But it’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie. Its purpose is to contrast the squalor of medieval England, with the majesty of King Arthur, and the future Knights of the Round Table in Camelot. Seriously, there’s a lot going on in this one short scene. First of all there’s a guy, played by Eric Idle, who bangs a pan and shouts “Bring out your dead!” He says it 12 times. Idle’s character is called the “Dead Collector”. The old man who’s about to become dead is played by, John Young. Cleese plays the carrier of the soon to be dead man, who pays the Dead Collector a fee of ninepence.

Alright, that’s a long way ‘round to get to the point. Every Frame a Painting is, after eight years, NOT dead. Maybe they just thought, “I think I’ll go for a walk.” Well, they’re not fooling anyone, because they’re back! I think every fan hoped that one day they would be.

Thanks to a heads-up posted on Mastodon by Jason Kottke, his post tells the backstory of Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou showing their new short film at the XOXO Festival (sounds fun). Now you can see it on YouTube, as well as catch up on the rest of their videos.

I feel happy! I feel happy!