Child upset because grandmother said "poop"

[Nelsie]

Pshaw! I think you need to pay closer attention to modern cinematography, and notice how often an expert cinematographer will frame the important bit of the shot in a doorway, between a wall and a truck, through a keyhole, etc. Not to mention the sadly lost art of split-screening, where the director will often just ignore the artifice of setting up the scenary and props to frame the subject and just accept the “black space” — which, let’s face it, works a heck of a lot better in the cinema than on a web page.

It would be nice if YouTube used something other than black to frame their portrait format videos, true, and I don’t know how you can regard cropping the video as any kind of solution, but what I’m proposing is simply to allow non-standard frames. YouTube is not a television, there’s no physical requirement to fit all video into a fixed format. Heck, even cinemas have been able to adjust their landscape screens to more than one landscape ratio for decades, and they have to physically move atoms around. All YouTube have to do is change a bit of code. An involved bit of code, to be sure, but in the end no more difficult to accommodate than non-standard frames for static pictures.

These folk who turn their camera or phone sideways to take a shot that suits a portrait format are applying instinctively the same visual reasoning to moving images that any photographer would. If your object of interest is a person instead of a landscape, then you use portrait format. Simples.

[art_carnage]

Sorry, but no, You’re just finding excuses for poor camerawork.

Videos, unlike photos, are almost universally presented horizontally. There’s a reason for this: It’s how we’re built to view the world. Our vision allows us to see more to the left and right than top and bottom. So when you shoot a video on your smartphone in portrait mode, you’re violating not only the set video standard, but also the laws of nature as they pertain to human sight.

- Wired Magazine 8/3/2013

[Nelsie]

Sidney Furie and Otto Heller beg to differ:

THE IPCRESS FILE - 100 Cinematic Shots from Vashi Nedomansky on Vimeo.

Landscape may well be the most convenient format for a wide variety of shots, but it is in no way The Law. And it is a low blow to claim that because these YouTube contributors are amateurs they must therefore be Doing It Wrong. They are making a creative decision every bit as valid as any photographer would. The fact that it’s a moving image instead of a static one is almost entirely irrelevent for most of these shots.

(Shoot. How do I get Vimeo vids to embed properly?)

Edit to add:

Thanks, OtherMichael!

[art_carnage]

I’m pretty sure, which is to say, I’m absolutely positive, that The Ipcress File was filmed in glorious, widescreen CinemaScope, with a whopping 2.35 :1 aspect ratio. So… what was your point again? Oh, yeah. You were attempting to conflate individual scene composition with an entire video’s screen orientation.

Humans have horizontally oriented vision, and that’s why we prefer moving pictures which fill our horizontal field of view. Period.

[Nelsie]

Did you watch the video? That’s a rhetorical question, I see by the counter on the link that you didn’t.

If you had, you might realise that your rationalisation is self-contradictory bollocks. The frame of the camera is a compositional device. I was explicitly taught that in art college, but you don’t have to have an arts education to realise it, not when you can see it with your own eyes whenever you open a newspaper or a web page.

Film-makers shoot in landscape 16:9 or 2.35:1 because that’s how cinemas display their moving pictures. Many cinematographers, limited by the design of their cameras and the architecture of theatres, unable to literally break out of that frame, will compose shots so that the subject is framed by elements within the widescreen frame. The webpage has no such constriction.

If you had looked at the link — you know, just clicked it out of curiousity, a desire to learn something new today, a readiness to have your ideas challenged, perhaps — you would have seen that the preview image for the video was this:

Here, Heller has used a lampshade to frame the subject within the 1:2.35 camera frame, “wasting” two-thirds of the shot with an ugly, garish expanse of nothing but red. What an amateur! Doesn’t he know “the laws of nature as they pertain to human sight”, to quote that well-known source of all arts knowledge, Wired.†

Please don’t repeat your assertion that the moving picture requires more constrictive layout rules than static images, just because before all these ignorant amateurs started uploading vertical format videos to YouTube that’s all you’d ever seen. Because that would just embarrass both of us. I’d like to think you’re more intelligent than a kitten in a visual development experiment.

To repeat my basic point: there is no such rule —and no reason — that video must be displayed on a webpage in landscape format. Just rationalisation.

† Honestly, do you remember the early issues of Wired? How they looked? Whoever wrote that drivel clearly doesn’t.

[art_carnage]

News flash - opening a link in a new tab by right-clicking on it, doesn’t bump a link’s counter. Just one more thing you’re wrong about. I watched enough to get the gist of compilation, but not the whole thing, since I’ve seen the movie several times, including on the big screen in CinemaScope, when it first came out in '65, and again at a revival art house in the 90s.

And you’ve got the whole film aspect/theater screen aspect cause and effect completely ass-backwards. Theaters don’t dictate, they follow. If you’ll look at all the advancements in cinema, they flowed from the filmmakers down to the theaters, not the other way around. Take THX and Dolby sound, wide-screen images, and the move to digital projection. These all came from the filmmakers, and the theater owners grudgingly complied.

As for your examples, you’re again trying to conflate a compositional choice of an individual scene, with an entire format. Sorry, that’s still not going to fly, no matter how much you try to obfuscate your error.

Let me know when Hollywood starts making tall movies. Until then, your argument is poop. Poop, I say!

[Nelsie]

Yes, I made a mistake about the counter. That was a thing I did not know. And now I do.

The thing about the movie theaters and the cameras is that it’s all a system that’s locked down to showing landscape format. It doesn’t matter who leads, what matters is the tricks a film-maker has to perform to shoot portraits when he wants to do that and the system doesn’t allow him to. They have to be artful about it because they can’t just roll the camera and screen around.

Since we’re talking about videos on YouTube of short duration, typically, then comparison to short scenes or single shots in a longer Hollywood movie is entirely appropriate. It’s you who is confusing scale. These amateurs aren’t making two-hour-long Hollywood narratives; they’re just putting up snippets of cinéma vérité. The people making these videos are exercising an ability to turn the camera around that just isn’t available to pro film-makers; and in doing so they’re making a compositional choice every bit as valid as Heller blocking two-thirds of the screen with a lampshade or shooting through a pane of glass in a phone booth to get a portrait shot.

The system on a webpage is locked down by nothing but code. Google has a truckload of talented codewriters who could knock out something that would allow videos to be shown in portrait format without the ugly framing devices they have now in fairly short order, I’m sure. We’re not talking predicting flu epidemics here, or translating Japanese (badly). I can only assume they haven’t done this despite the number of video makers who continue to shoot portrait because they’ve been influenced by critics like yourself who have invented bullshit “natural laws” to lend their aesthetic choices unsupported authority.

You can dislike portrait videos all you want, but don’t pretend it’s the law when it’s nothing but your personal preference.

[art_carnage]

You keep saying that I said “it’s the law”. Never said that. What I am saying is that horizontally formatted moving pictures didn’t just happen that way. There was no toss of a coin where someone said “Heads it wide, tails it’s tall”. It happened because the landscape mode is more esthetically pleasing, as it draws us into the scene by accommodating our horizontally oriented field of vision. That’s just a fact. Our eyes can scan left and right 170°, but up and down only 130°. You can call that fact bullshit too, if you want, but it won’t change the reality.

If you think these are “invented laws”, then tell me, why are movies shot in landscape? After all, at first they were nearly square, but over time evolved into the wide screens of today. When talkies came in, it was the perfect time to go to a narrower image, since the sound track was now taking up part of the film that used to be used for the image. But instead, filmmakers worked around that, and images kept getting wider and wider, and audiences craved them.

I’d like to hear your explanation of why the public prefers widescreen movies.