The cinematic look: Not always appropriate

One of the things I’ve noticed thanks to my forays into “how to make videos that don’t suck much” tutorials is the emphasis apparently placed on the “cinematic” look — apparently crucial to making your videos look great and professional.

It’s not just about the lighting and the colour grading and all the stuff you might imagine, but also about the... aspect ratio?

Yes, the aspect ratio. To make your video look “cinematic”, you have to make it in ultra-crazy deluxe really-widescreen format. Kinda like this:

This is wiiiiiiiiide, man!

This, by the way, is a still from a YouTube short. It’s about seven minutes long. Incidentally, it’s a comedy short.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I watch YouTube videos on a bog-standard 16:9 monitor, which is wide... but not that wide. This is how it looks on my monitor:

Letterboxed.

Okay, not too bad. It has letterboxing top and bottom, which doesn’t really get in the way. Apparently, we are conditioned to look at an image like this and think, “Wow, this looks epic!” for some reason, so... okay.

Did I mention this was a YouTube short? Did I mention it was seven minutes long? Well, here’s the thing: these days people are consuming that kind of content on their phones. And most people hold their phones in portrait orientation. If it’s worth it — meaning, if they’re watching a Netflix Original — they’ll turn their phones to landscape orientation. But for this, they’re probably scrolling through a feed in portrait orientation, and this is what that looks like:

Where is it?

Suddenly, it doesn’t look epic. It looks microscopic.

Now, I’m going to continue making my videos in 16:9 format, at least for the time being. My point here is not that we should all switch to olde tyme Instagram 1:1 format: my point is that while striving for a cinematic look is great for films that are to be shown in a cinema, it may be counter-productive on other platforms. It makes the image smaller.

The reason we associate letterboxing with epic cinematography is not because letterboxing in itself is epic: it’s because movies shown on TV have often been letterboxed. That’s all.

For most purposes, landscape format makes sense because our eyes are arranged horizontally. Beyond that, I’d like to suggest that we bear in mind who is going to watch our stuff and where they’re going to watch it — and not make life difficult for them by making the image smaller and harder to see just because “it’s cinematic”.