Screenshot of Adobe Photoshop’s window showing multiple screen sizes.
People’s opinions on the appropriateness of vertical videos are strong.
People’s opinions on the appropriateness of vertical videos are strong.
Screenshot of TikTok compilations on YouTube showing the pillar-boxed video, shot in 9:16 aspect ratio.
"Curry Power" is a 10-minute vertical video and musical collage filmed, edited and produced by Christoph A. Geiseler.
Illustration of standardized screen sizes.
Horizontal photograph of the Academy’s meetings.
Online comic from https://jaysdesktop.blogspot.com/, showing the limitations of watching a widescreen film on a 4:3 television set.
Glove and Boots PSA against the ‘vertical video syndrome’.
Glove and Boots PSA against the ‘vertical video syndrome’.
Trailer for the Vertical Film Festival, dedicated to showcasing features and shorts made entirely in 9:16 ratios.
An online community for vertical filmmakers - amature and professional. Created 13 years ago, its description reads: “Welcome to the advent of a new wave of videography.”
Frames and Containers by Charlie Shackleton uses dynamic framing techniques to demonstrate the fluidity of borders.
Samsung’s bezel-less professional desktop monitors that promise minimal borders.
We live in a frameless age, claims filmmaker and video essayist Charlie Shackleton (2017). The ubiquity of screens everywhere is masked by the pantheon of display conditions and furthered by the transportability of digital file formats – almost anything can be seen anywhere. As an optimistic filmmaker, this explosion of audio-visual content is a hopeful testament to my future employment, but at the same time produces a new question to grapple with: what aspect ratio works for everything? Will my movie lose its charm if black boxes appear on the side instead of the top of the screen?
The debate around the aesthetic qualities of a tall frame as opposed to a wide frame is highly charged and is mostly articulated with the verticalists crouching in a defensive position. It is vehemently claimed that pillar-boxing is aesthetically repulsive, unnatural, and signals an amateur production. Nothing worthy of the high art of cinema, as journalist Brad Warthen (2016) claims in a provocative blog post: “Vertical video is the unmistakable mark of the clueless — or of someone who’s hiding something, trying to make you look at this one thing rather than see the context in which that one thing is occurring.”
Yet, our phones are almost always held vertically, 94% of all times. New media technologies have embraced the use of a vertical aspect ratio with the omnipresent ‘stories’ feature. Vertical frames are not uncommon in non-digital texts, most books are vertical, the windows at Ashoka are vertical, and the famous Times Square advertisement boards are vertical. Moreover, 96% of video production on the internet is the work of non-professionals using their hand-held phones (Clayton, 2021).
Although, this statistic might not have been imaginable even a few years ago. A member of the online discussion board in 2011 notes: “I know that these people aren't shooting video this way because they prefer tallscreen video; I think it's just because they normally hold the device vertically and it doesn't occur to them to rotate it when shooting video.” Members of the board agree that pillar-boxed videos are an amateurish move, yet note exceptions like FaceTime and portrait still images.
The issue seems to be two-fold: the aesthetic inadequacy of tall screens and their perceived inability to gel well with screens that are designed for wider aspect ratios: “Does anyone actually take a video on their camera phone that they expect to look good enough to watch on a large TV? Maybe I'm just naive, but I cannot imagine that the quality is good enough to worry about how the videos look on anything other than a phone or in a small window on a computer monitor.”
Aspect ratios are independent of image quality, yet the correlation between them in the comment above delineates the fundamental issue, that audio-visual content is composed of and is displayed within multiple frames, and anything apart from a perfect overlap is considered ‘noise’. The material on which or from which the image emanates - the ‘screen’, physical borders of the image - the ‘frame’, and the framing of subjects within the film space, all must then be in perfect harmony (Ross, 2020).
Commenting on a vertically shot documentary, Vimeo user Matthew Mammola says: “This is awesome! I love the filling of the vertical frame! It's certainly best viewed when embedded (as I found it on your site verticalvideos.com/).” It is the filling of the screen that elevates the video to its artistic status, and moreover, the window-in-window set-up of the internet (embedding), makes the framing dynamic. In these cases, while the aspect ratio might be locked in, the scaling of the video frame exposes more or less of the ‘noise’.
In a 1930 essay called “The Dynamic Square”, Sergei Eisenstein (1982 published) radically sought to counter similar notions about standardized aspect ratios in the early history of Hollywood. He charged that neither a tall frame nor a wider frame was particularly aesthetically competent – the choice depends on the story. Instead, he advocated for a 1:1 frame that would be transportable between the 1.33:1 aspect ratio of early film and television, while not losing any content via masking if it needed to be projected onto a wider screen.
Passionate as he was for freeing cinema from crystallized bounds, Eisenstien’s project failed to gain steam. Hollywood was set to implement the Academy Ratio of 1.37:1 in 1932, which remained untouched in the industry till the CinemaScope and Panavision anamorphic lenses allowed a ratio of 2.66:1, about twice as wide (Ross, 2020).
Transferring the newer Cinemascope movies also proved to be an uneasy task for television producers since it required cutting off the top and the bottom of the picture. Otherwise, viewers were stuck with a smaller internal frame on a more square television set (Cardwell, 2015; Ross, 2020). Additionally, the cathode ray tube set-up of the television boxes meant that the edges of the screen were rounded, giving rise to a viewfinder that included line guides to show the cut-off area while directing. Eventually, the standardized 16:9 came about that could show both, 1.33:1 and 2.66:1 films on TV (Singleton-Turner, 2020).
Miriam Ross (2020) argues that three domains of ideologies played a part in naturalizing the Academy ratio. First was the commercial competition between oligopolies in early Hollywood mandated that production equipment needed to be adaptable between brands and an opposition to the creative autonomy theatre owners took to mask film reels in their projection setups. It was understood that the audience reception depended on viewing circumstances which needed to be controlled to assure quality. Second were technological challenges in projection systems that forced projectionists to use non-standard masks and a need for continuity between sound film reels and silent ones. Lastly were the aesthetic arguments which derived credence from biological assumptions that human eyes, being laterally placed on the face, see the world in landscape mode. Thus was born a “multilayered, multistaged commitment” (Ross 2020) to widescreens.
Ross (2020) concludes that aesthetic ideologies about early film reels were not as naturalized until ideologies about the limitations of contemporary technology worked to solidify those very limitations. By presenting older aspect ratios as problems, technological progress made it harder for older aspect ratios to be accommodated by newer technologies. Thus, technological progress cannot be understood as a linear advancement, but rather by underscoring the interdependence of ideologies and technical innovation.
Though, Rafe Clayton (2021) contends that technologically imposed ‘limitations’ can and have been artistically used to challenge the very basis on which they were deemed as aesthetic inadequacies. Robert Whitman (1964), Jaroslav Flic (1970) and Brain Eno (1989) are the most cited examples of experimental video art that deployed vertical video in such a manner.
Closer to contemporary times, the “vertical video syndrome” was a moment in the fast cycle of online controversies which describes a campaign against tall-screened videos. Glove and Boots (2011), a satirical YouTube channel, produced a ‘public service announcement’ bearing the controversy’s name. While the dialogue explicitly placed opprobrium on vertical videos, the subtext of irony was used to convey the opposite. Moreover, the pillar boxes were creatively repurposed to place the narrator and other free-floating graphics as the frame moves from widescreen to tall-screen.
Feature film directors like Wes Anderson use different aspect ratios in a single movie to signify the time period they refer to, thus making the framing stand in for a historical time period. In Mommy (2015), director Xavier Dolan shows the main character physically pushing apart the square frame into a widescreen to show a figurative opening of horizons. While television shows like The Wire (2002-08) consciously used the old 4:3 aspect ratio, despite standing at the crossroads of changing screens in the early 21st century (Cardwell, 2015). Popular textbooks, filmmaking YouTube channels and podcasts – all advise that aspect ratios are dependent on what the project demands and that a decision must be made based on its function within the film.
The evolution of the widescreen as the cinematic standard and its subsequent adaption by the television industry illustrated an impulse in the culture industry to homogenize the moving image as a self-contained yet boundless art object. In 1894, the British Journal Photographic Almanac, and Photographers Daily Companion justified using widescreen to fill all of the screen to avoid turning attention away from the content of the film (Hovet, 2017), a concern echoed by journalist Brad Warthen (2016) more than a hundred years later.
Citing Hugo Munsterberg, Sarah Cardwell (2015) argues that the moving image frame functions to give us a sense of completeness as the art object is severed from its surroundings. Modern rules of formal composition like the rule of thirds, the use of leading lines, and centre-weighted focus, give the filmmaker enough resources to channel viewer attention inside the frame.
Moreover, picture-in-picture capabilities, the possibility of embedded audio-visual content alongside text or other media, and the overlapping windows of computers – all go challenge this concentration of viewers’ attention inside the frame. Indeed, the container of a frame is becoming increasingly irrelevant, as Shackleton (2017) has pointed out. Features like screencast and extended display monitors can even move the content across the physical boundaries of devices.
In this case, I argue that such a dissolution of boundaries and the attentional dissolution it enables critically reduces the potential for counter-publics to form in a way that challenges the framing standards of the industry. By erasing traces of the discursive-rhetorical basis on which current standard aspect ratios came to be, technological progress is again imposing limitations on itself.
While the adaption of sound-on-film sparked a race to eliminate the squarish shape of reels that occurred due to the presence of an additional sound track (Hovet, 2017), contemporary technological giants have begun introducing rimless screens. Driven by the aesthetic-ideological needs carrying over from cinema screens, from the material limits of the small screen, the border disappears:
“Look, I take my iPhone videos horizontally, because I know that's the way they'll look normal. You have to. But it's a pain in the ass for me … and it's not ideal.” (Stein, 2014)
“Crop the sensor, rotate it, I don't care. If someone can find out a way to overcome this little problem, it would make videos so much easier to record … So what if you can't see your videos filling the whole screen? At least the phone would be comfortable to hold.” (Stein, 2014)
<aside> 🗨️ List of References
Cardwell, S. (2015). A Sense of Proportion: Aspect Ratio and the Framing of Television Space. Critical Studies in Television. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/CST.10.3.7
Clayton, R. (2021). The context of vertical filmmaking literature. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 39(3), 644–655. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2021.1874853
Eisenstein , S. (1982). The dynamic square. Film Essays and a Lecture, 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400853922.48
Frames and Containers. (2017). Frames and Containers | [in]Transition. Retrieved May 15, 2023, from http://mediacommons.org/intransition/2017/05/31/frames-and-containers-0.
Hovet, T. (2017). The persistence of the rectangle. Film History, 29(3), 136–168. https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.29.3.06
Ross, M. (2020). Reconfigurations of Screen Borders: The New or Not-So-New As pect Ratios. In S. Ø. Sæther & S. T. Bull (Eds.), Screen Space Reconfigured (pp. 105–125). essay, Amsterdam University Press.
Singleton-Turner, R. (2020). Appendix I: Aspect ratios. In Cue and Cut: A practical approach to working in multi-camera studios (1st ed., pp. 400–407). essay, Manchester University Press. Retrieved May 15, 2023, from https://www.manchesterhive.com/downloadpdf/9781526162229/9781526162229.00032.xml.
Stein, S. (2014). Defending vertical videos: They’re stupid, but it’s not your fault. CNET. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/smartphone-vertical-video-what-needs-to-be-changed/
Vertical Video Syndrome PSA. (2011). YouTube. Retrieved May 15, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2picMQC-9E&pp=ygUXdmVydGljYWwgdmlkZW8gc3luZHJvbWU=.
Vertical Videos: MIMA presents “Curry Power.” (2021). Vimeo. Retrieved May 15, 2023, from https://vimeo.com/42713243.
Warthen, B. (2016). No vertical video! Not now, not ever! It’s WRONG! [web log]. Retrieved May 15, 2023, from https://bradwarthen.com/2016/09/no-vertical-video-not-now-not-ever-its-wrong/.
What are your thoughts on “Tallscreen” video? Steve Hoffman Music Forums. (2011, June 18). https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/what-are-your-thoughts-on-tallscreen-video.254300/
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