A look into Vertical Cinema

I’ve recently been intrigued by vertical filmmaking and have grown to wonder whether it can be used to create impactful, relatable stories.

This frame is from The Dispute by Mikey Alfred demonstrates that despite the frame being much narrower than in traditional filmmaking, you are still able to effectively frame two characters and show some of the setting in the background. Another film I watched was The Stunt Double by Damien Chazelle, and that was a great short film that bounced between genres in the vertical format.

I love challenging my creativity and I find it interesting how orientating the frame differently opens up so many doors for innovating and inspiration.

From what I’ve seen, these two styles of filmmaking are technically the same, however, the differences arise in the stories that you can tell. The vertical frame lends itself to stories that have a lot of height variation in there characters and settings, therefore, if I wanted to create a vertically framed film, I would write a story that was set in either the mountains or a city.

Having only seen these two examples of vertical cinema, I will be searching for more examples and exploring whats possible for this format.