What makes a FrameRate Select?
FrameRate Selects are projects that stop our team in our tracks. Here's how we choose outstanding filmmaking craft to feature on our platform.
Every day, filmmakers and video creators of all stripes upload projects to FrameRate. Some of those projects stop us in our tracks.
That's the simplest way to describe a FrameRate Select: work that makes us stop and pay attention.
It's work that we, as a team, believe represents outstanding filmmaking craft. Not necessarily the most-watched, the most-shared, or the most algorithmically optimized. Just work that genuinely impresses us.
FrameRate Selects appear on our homepage, in our social media feeds, and, when we have the time and bandwidth to do it justice, here on the blog.
(We'd love to write about every single Select, but we simply don't have the time.)
How does a project become a FrameRate Select?
The first requirement is simple: the project has to be on FrameRate.
We only select from videos that have actually been uploaded here. In a sense, uploading your work is already a nomination. You don't have to do anything else.
Before a Select goes live, we reach out to the account owner to let them know. If, for whatever reason, you'd rather not be featured, just say so. We'll skip it, no questions asked.
So what are we actually looking for?
This is where it gets harder to pin down, and I want to be honest about why.
There is no checklist. Not because we haven't thought carefully about it, but because a checklist would undermine the whole point.
If we published a precise set of criteria, we'd essentially be inviting people to optimize for the criteria rather than the work. The result would be folks gaming the system, and gaming the system produces work that checks boxes, not work that's genuinely interesting.
What we do instead is ask ourselves a loose set of questions when we're looking at a project. No single project has to satisfy all of them. They're more of a framework than a formula.
A loose framework of questions
Is this project doing something new?
Not new as in "never been done before" (a standard almost nothing meets), but new in the sense of using familiar tools in unexpected ways, or approaching new tools with old-school intention.
A film can be technically conventional and still feel fresh if the thinking behind it is sharp.
Does it stand out?
We have reviewed literally tens of thousands of projects over the last couple of decades. And we spend much of our days swimming in the latest work from around the world.
We know when something stands out, and we know when it doesn't. We trust that instinct, even when it's hard to fully articulate.
Does the craft hold up?
This one is harder to generalize because craft means something different depending on the medium and the production methods involved.
What we're asking about a hand-drawn film is not the same as what we're asking about a commercial VFX shot or a single-camera documentary.
But in every case, we're looking at how something was made, and whether the execution lives up to the intention behind it.
These questions don't produce a score, they produce a conversation.
And sometimes that conversation ends with one of us saying, "Yes, this is a Select."
One last thing
Being chosen as a FrameRate Select isn't a competition.
There's no ranking, no tiered system, no implication that a Select is better than work that isn't featured. It's just work that catches our eye and that we want to put in front of more people.
That's it.