Landscape colonoscopies.
All I’m sayin’.
Sure, the image is landscape, because cinemas don’t have much variance in format. But webpages are not cinema screens. Even my ancient monitor has the option to turn it to portrait mode.
If you watch the video I linked you’d see that the cinematographer, Otto Heller, put in a lot of shots framed to break out of that limited landscape cinemascope format. The preview shot you refer to uses the lampshade to frame Dalby in a portrait shot; the shade serves no other purpose that couldn’t be served with a red gel. Heller or Sydney J Furie wanted a portrait shot of Dalby, so that’s what’s on the screen. Everything else is superfluous. There are many other shots like that, including 1:45–1:55’s extreme vertical frame. That is a portrait shot for all that it was shown on a landscape screen.
The other examples you give are also about breaking out of that limited landscape format. Cinemas and 70mm film cameras are hefty investments and anything involved with them is locked into that format, just like floppy discs were stuck in 8", 5.25", 3.5" formats: nothing else would fit in their respective drives. But there was nothing intrinsically correct about 8 or 5.25 or 3.5 inches. That’s just the way they turned out.
Web pages are not cinema screens. They are meant to be flexible, not to be rigid. The same flexibility that lets you decide on portrait or landscape for photos, 4:3 or 16:9 or square or 2.39:1, should also be applicable for video. If your subject would benefit from a portrait shot — like, say, a portrait — then you should be able to use a portrait video without black bars or other filler, just like a photo.
What kind of happy mutant not only accepts limitations, but actively insists on them?
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