Horizontal or Vertical?
So, what’s your preferred position – horizontal or vertical?
Before you go off and write your strongly worded e-mail of complaint, however, you do know we’re talking about filming stuff, right? What did you think we meant?!
OK, the way that you film things on your phone isn’t the most significant issue flying around the globe at the moment, but it is essential for two reasons:
A) It’s one of the things that grinds our Mike’s gears, along with hayfever, James Corden, and the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre
B) It really can have an impact on your video’s quality, frequently in a negative way
In this post, we want to talk a little about “Horizontal or Vertical”, how the landscape (pun not intended) has changed slightly in the past few years, regarding this issue, and our opinion on this hot topic.
THE PAST
Back in the day, when we were all young and didn’t need to go out to the toilet twice a night every night, our opinion on this was absolute – you should film horizontally every single time.
After all, unless you’re the living embodiment of a Picasso painting, you spend your life viewing things horizontally because that’s how your eyes are aligned!
This is why TV programmes and movies are horizontal. Simple, right?
THE PRESENT
Over the last couple of years, however, two words have begun to shift the conversation on this issue – “social” and “media”.
Video has become a massive deal on social media. After all, there’s been an 80% increase, year-by-year, of videos uploaded onto Instagram, and 82% of Twitter users watch video content on the platform.
Since Snapchat burst onto the scene, other social media channels, such as Instagram and Facebook, have made efforts to capitalise on its success, which was driven mainly by encouraging users to post videos in a vertical format.
Yes, there’s a sting in the tail! Now, if you go to upload a video “story” on either Instagram or Facebook, you’ll notice that the default is for a vertical video, and nobody seems to mind!
The times they are a-changin’!
THE FUTURE
We still believe that horizontal is the best approach, and moving forward, we encourage you to continue filming in this way.
The horizontal format is far superior to vertical when showing most things in daily life, and it’s easier to edit a video filmed this way, too.
We do recognise that things have changed, however. So, if you’re filming something through Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or Facebook, and that’s where it’s going to live…well, vertical is OK, we guess.
For more on this pressing issue, watch the video above to hear from Mike.
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