As filmmakers, we’ve always lived inside the frame. Every generation defines what that frame looks like—how wide, how tall, how immersive—and then tests its boundaries until the next revolution arrives. Today, that revolution is already in our hands. It’s the phone we carry, the screen we tilt vertically without a thought, and the new visual grammar that will define how billions of people watch moving images for decades to come.
For more than a century, film has survived every technological upheaval: the coming of sound, the shift to color, the arrival of television, home video, digital, and streaming. Each change looked like an existential threat until artists reimagined what cinema could be. The next evolution—vertical filmmaking—is no different. What began as an aesthetic compromise for social-media clips has become a cultural inevitability, and, for those of us who make films, an urgent creative challenge.
When Edison’s engineers standardized 35 mm film in the 1890s, the moving image was a perfect square—1:1, then 1.33:1 once sound was added. That square defined the architecture of early movie theaters and the way audiences learned to see. Up through the 1930s, movies like Intolerance and Grand Hotel framed their worlds vertically—tall sets, full figures, head-to-toe choreography.
In 1953, fearing television’s new boxy competition, Hollywood widened the frame. Fox’s CinemaScope stretched the image to 2.55:1, Paramount followed with VistaVision, and the rest of the industry raced to fill ever-longer rectangles. Widescreen promised grandeur and immersion, but it also changed how stories were told: intimacy gave way to spectacle; characters stood side by side rather than head to toe.
That same logic—of adapting art to the screen it lives on—is what we face again now, only in reverse. The frame is narrowing, the height returning. The question is how to make it expressive rather than restrictive.
Fred Astaire once said he preferred the 1.33 format because it showed his dancing “head to toe.” Vertical filmmaking restores that possibility. A phone screen is roughly 9:16, or 0.56:1—twice as tall as it is wide. For cinematographers who have spent their careers thinking horizontally, that shift demands a complete re-education. Composition, movement, and even performance adjust to gravity again.
The irony is that, technologically, we’ve never had more flexibility. Modern digital cameras capture enormous full-frame sensors—6K, 8K—allowing us to extract any portion later. Studios already shoot with multiple framelines marked in the viewfinder: theatrical 2.39, streaming 1.78, IMAX 1.43, and now vertical 9:16. The smartest approach is to shoot full-frame—a square or near-square canvas—so you can adapt the material to every platform without reshoots. Cropping is creative freedom.
The shift isn’t only about new productions. There’s an enormous archival question: how will the last hundred years of cinema be viewed vertically? Movies shot before 1953—Casablanca, The 39 Steps, Gone With the Wind—were composed almost square, so they adapt relatively easily. Films shot widescreen, especially true anamorphic 2.35 or 2.40, present a nightmare. You can’t simply slice a horizontal epic into a vertical rectangle without destroying its rhythm.
Yet the demand will come. Billions of viewers in Asia, Africa, and India already consume everything vertically. Converting legacy cinema into that format will require a new class of technicians—digital artisans who combine editing, panning, and reframing skills once used in the old pan-and-scan days of VHS. It’s ironic but fitting: the same industry that feared automation will soon rely on human craft again to reshape its past.
Every format creates its own language. Widescreen taught us lateral movement—car chases, panoramic landscapes, dialogue across space. Vertical film, by contrast, emphasizes ascension and isolation. It privileges the single face, the body, the gaze. Close-ups become architecture. Light falls differently; sound carries more meaning because off-screen space extends above and below, not to the sides.
Some genres translate naturally. Dance, portraiture, and relationship dramas benefit from the intimacy of the tall frame. Horror will have to evolve—jump scares rely on peripheral vision that vertical frames eliminate—but sound design can replace what the eye loses. Symbolism, too, returns. Censors once forced directors to suggest rather than show; algorithms now do the same. Violence may fade to silhouette; sensuality becomes abstraction. The constraints invite invention.
The vertical revolution is not about abandoning film craft but rediscovering it. When I direct, I still think about lighting, contrast, and legibility—only now with the phone in mind. A dark, moody shot that looks elegant on a theatrical screen disappears entirely on a mobile device in daylight. In some regions—Africa, parts of Asia—a dimly lit image is invisible. Brightness is the new chiaroscuro. The cinematic challenge is to balance style with visibility.
By Gregory Hatanaka
