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"Nearly every stylistic decision you see about the channel — the length of the clips, the number of examples, which studios’ films we chose, the way narration and clip audio weave together, the reordering and flipping of shots, the remixing of 5.1 audio, the rhythm and pacing of the overall video — all of that was reverse-engineered from YouTube’s Copyright ID."

"I spent about a week doing brute force trial-and-error. I would privately upload several different essay clips, then see which got flagged and which didn’t. This gave me a rough idea what the system could detect, and I edited the videos to avoid those potholes.

So something that was designed to restrict us ended up becoming our style."

"And yet there were major problems with all of these decisions. We wouldn’t realize it until years later. But by creating such a simple, approachable style that skirted the edge of legality, we pretty much cut ourselves off from our most ambitious topics.

For instance, we’d always wanted to talk about Tarkovsky, but it’s impossible to talk about how he moved the camera without talking about why he moved the camera — and that meant playing very long shots (impossible due to Copyright ID) and discussing religion.

Similarly, we could never figure out how to tackle Agnes Varda, because our favorite idea required shooting new footage that didn’t mesh well with what existed."