Originally published at: TikToker uses AI to reimagine movies, from Gladiator to Barbie, in portrait mode | Boing Boing
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“Once Upon A Time In The West” made me giggle. There’s an opening that needs wide screen to breath.
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Humans interact with the world most frequently on a horizontal plane. Even in many of these shots, there’s nothing meaningful in the vertical space.
The most absurd one was Lawrence of Arabia. The main non-human character of the movie is the expansive horizon of the desert, not more sky.
Also, if you want to pitch verticality as a cinematic virtue, don’t try to reframe action designed for horizontal aspect ratios. Create new work for which the vertical frame is important from a visual storytelling perspective. (oops, I said the C word).
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‘Vertical video’ pretty much only exists because of smartphones - devices which are wholly unsuited to any movie whose director thought they were making a film for the cinema.
However impractical many will say it would have been, if would have been better if this had been foreseen and if phone designers had designed the software to only show video in landscape mode, forcing users to rotate their phones by 90°.
(And something about lawns,while I’m here.) 
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Lawns look better in landscape mode. 
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You’re saying an image of the landscape of my yard looks better in the format named after it?
That can’t be right. /s
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Could really do without the melodramatic soundtrack he overlayed, which gives the whole thing a gravitas that “used a computer to extend an image” simply doesn’t earn.
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… I’ve instructed my phone to only take square photographs from now on 
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Prediction: to get audiences back, theatres are going to remodel to accommodate a wave of re-released films in “AI 360”.
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I can’t wait for my Holodeck…
It wouldn’t be a tiktok video without that voice
try this on for size
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.
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Surprisingly, not too bad, but of course, he chose the very best familiar examples to try it – and I am kinda partial to the design of still images in portrait proportions. It did, however, make every scene feel as if I were watching it from a modest seat of a stage production. There’s just not a familiar tradition for portrait style scenes that need a personal, intimate or close-up feel. If the audience even thinks “Hey! It’s FaceTime”, the suspension of disbelief is gone. Maybe someday, but not now, and probably not soon. I won’t call this successful, but it’s interesting.
Busby Berekely would have loved it.
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What happens is i am distracted by the massive white pages of boingboing on ether side of the video and board after the 3rd on, the future of films it is not…
I mean, the studios tried, but the pandemic put an end to Quibi.
I actually do think it wasn’t a bad idea and it could have worked with better timing. Not for me, but I could see it being popular.
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Okay, but it’s cheating in every case. It’s zooming alllll the way out until the original 70mm wide footage fits in the meagre vertical-video horizontal space, then fills in above and below with more scenery. So all the action and emotional moments are now microscopic. That’s not changing directorial style to suit the format, it’s just a cropping stunt.
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New band name?
Ah, but now it doesn’t have those black bars.
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