Short Form Video Content: The Antithesis of Cinema?
“In order to communicate effectively, you must go to where the audiences are. Short-form video has the highest engagement rate of any content on social media.”
Louis Le Prince introduced us to the moving image in 1888. Rapidly developing over the subsequent 60 years, the medium captured our imaginations, as storytellers pivoted from stage to the silver screen. The Russian Revolution in 1917 solidified film as a medium of mass communication. We have been telling stories and communicating information to the masses using the visual medium for over 100 years: the most common form being the feature film; usually 120 - 180 minutes in length, in a landscape widescreen format.
But something has changed recently. The frame has fallen on its side: the shape of phones, coupled with our consumption habits on social media, has led to the rise of short-form vertical video. The social media platform arms race and the attention economy has been supercharged by Tiktok, as established players scramble to produce de facto copies of doom-scrolling algorithms, in order to lock us in endless loops of 20-second dopamine hits. This is the new canvas on which visual artists must paint to stay relevant. Many filmmakers, us included, are wary of this tall yet thin canvas. We question why we have spent over a century telling stories in a wide, horizontal format, only to decide that this is no longer the best method of visual communication. Vertical video is incredibly restrictive when it comes to framing shots. And when producing films for both landscape and vertical deliveries, there is always a compromise. Either you capture rushes in a landscape format, and throw away two thirds of your pixels by cropping in, or you shoot vertically, thus committing to ONLY creating a vertical video. Cinematography also becomes trickier: do you frame wider to allow for the vertical crop, thus compromising the framing of your landscape composition? Have you considered adding foreground interest in the centre of the frame, so when you reduce it to a tall, thin, canvas; it still follows the rule of thirds?
At Lamplight, we’ve embraced this change. In order to communicate effectively, you must go to where the audiences are. Short-form video has the highest engagement rate of any content on social media. If a picture speaks 1000 words, how many does a video? Personality is the key to gaining a following on social media, people engage with people they relate to. No other medium shows off your personality like video can. We frequently test the fringes of this new vertical canvas, a great example being an entirely vertical music video for Jazz fusion artist Harry T Pope’ s song 22 Now (below). We have the most-viewed vertical reels on multiple of our clients pages for good reason. Social media content is a native language to us.
Tim Marsh, Filmmaker & Managing Director
22 Now - Harry T Pope
