Vertical Video Violation

We’ve all shot vertical video. We hold the phone vertically, use most of its functions vertically, take still photos vertically and often don’t even think twice about pressing the record button on the video vertically. Perhaps it’s only when we upload the video on YouTube or when the BBC have some amateur footage of a disaster or terrorist attack, and the video is played a third smaller with fuzzy grey bands on the left and right, that we realise the error of our ways. And thousands of people watching the video is thinking to themselves, ‘Why didn’t the idiot just hold the phone horizontally?’ (Presumably they didn't really have time to think about correct phone orientation in the middle of a terrorist attack.)

Films and videos have been shot and displayed in the landscape ratio for the last hundred years or so in cinemas and then on TV (though in early silent cinema and older TVs the ratio was 4:3, almost square – all through the 80s and 90s I was crying out for TVs, and then computers, to be widescreen; technology usually, eventually, catches up with me (see here and here, for example)). Then along come smart phones with video recorders and there’s the (unfortunate) option to shoot video vertically. I guess this is pretty logical – there's a fine tradition of portrait painting in, erm, portrait orientation dating back at least five hundred years, and photography has always been acceptable in portrait and landscape modes. Painting, drawing or photographing a person – the predominant subject of all art – seems correct in the portrait format as the human figure is long rather then wide.

But horizontal seems to be the dominant format in the digital age of widescreen TVs and computers; and the internet, from splash pages to web banners, all look best horizontal. And our eyes are side by side, not on top of each other, so horizontal feels more natural. There's almost a whole online movement to get people to shoot video horizontal: websites, YouTube tutorials and apps all to prevent Vertical Video Syndrome (yes, it's a meme).

Nevertheless, I feel there's a place for vertical video, alongside traditional portrait painting and photography. The technology just needs to catch up, as usual.

Elsewhere on the web:
It's time to take vertical video seriously