Stop Shooting Like Its 1999

In this post I welcome vertical filmmaking and then list seven sins that will halt your career.

Some filmmakers can tell you the sensor size of every camera on the market. Ask what their protagonist wants and the conversation becomes strangely quiet as they scroll down an amazon page full of gear for sale.

Others assemble the perfect kit for a film they haven’t written. These usually start camera rental facilities.

Then there are those who see a vertical film and dismiss it before watching a single scene. Apparently, turning a camera ninety degrees is an offence against cinema.

I love the big screen. I, the guy who founded a film festival because I believe in the experience of strangers sitting in the dark, discovering something together.

But loving cinema does not require pretending that audiences only encounter stories in cinemas.

“Stop shooting like it’s 1999” means questioning habits that have survived long after their usefulness.
Here are seven rules worth breaking.

1. Treating horizontal as a certificate of artistic seriousness

A horizontal frame offers wonderful possibilities: landscapes, relationships across space, a character dwarfed by their surroundings.

A vertical frame offers different possibilities: a face above a trembling hand, someone trapped in a doorway, a staircase disappearing overhead.

Neither shape writes your screenplay.

Imagine a thriller about a cleaner who discovers someone hiding in an office tower. A vertical composition could make the lift doors, narrow corridors and towering building part of the film’s visual language.

The format becomes a creative decision.

Try the same thirty-second scene in both orientations. Watch how the blocking changes. Which version makes the danger clearer? Which reveals something unexpected?

Choose with your eyes, rather than your prejudices.

2. Shooting wide and hoping the crop will save you

“Don’t worry. We’ll make a vertical version afterwards.”

Sometimes you can. Sometimes you are asking an editor to rescue a composition that never allowed for it.

Put two actors at opposite edges of a wide frame. Crop the middle into a portrait shape. You may lose both the reaction and the reason for it.

If you need both formats, plan both.

Test the intended framing before the shoot. Consider separate takes, different camera positions or blocking that works within each composition.

For a vertical scene, placing one character closer to camera and another deeper in the space can preserve their relationship without squeezing them shoulder to shoulder.

Also test graphics and subtitles on the actual viewing screen. Leave room for the interface your chosen platform puts around the image.

“Fix it in post” is an expensive substitute for looking through the camera.

3. Buying a camera to solve a writing problem

Your scene is flat. Clearly, you need a more expensive lens.

This is the filmmaking equivalent of buying a professional oven because nobody enjoyed your sandwich.

Better equipment can solve specific problems. It cannot give a character something to lose.

Before upgrading, shoot a scene with the equipment you already have. Give one person a secret and another a reason to discover it. Introduce a deadline. Make the location inconvenient.

Now you have something to direct.

If the existing camera cannot capture the image your story requires, identify why. Low light? A necessary lens choice? A delivery requirement?

Rent and test the solution.

A purchase should answer a production question. `
“Will people think I’m a proper filmmaker?” is a very costly question.

4. Worshipping resolution while neglecting sound

You have a beautiful image.

Unfortunately, the audience cannot hear the sentence that explains why the woman is leaving.

We buy screens to inspect pictures and headphones to forgive ourselves for recording dialogue beside a refrigerator.

Give sound its own preparation.

Listen to the location. Check traffic, ventilation, clothing noise and the neighbour’s enthusiastic building work. Use an appropriate microphone close enough to capture useful dialogue. Monitor during recording.

Record room tone. Protect time for sound editing.

Sound can also carry a vertical scene beyond its narrow frame. Footsteps overhead, a key turning offscreen or someone breathing behind the camera can suggest an entire world.

Spend according to what the audience needs to understand and feel.

The most impressive camera in the room cannot repair a crucial line that nobody recorded properly.

5. Confusing camera movement with directing

A gimbal arrives. Suddenly, every scene requires a floating tour of the furniture.

• The character sits down. We orbit.
• The character thinks. We orbit faster.
• The character receives terrible news. We execute a manoeuvre previously associated with helicopter surveillance.

Movement earns its place when it changes our experience of the scene.

A slow approach might increase intimacy. Following someone might reveal a threat. Staying still might force us to endure an uncomfortable silence.

In a vertical frame, a tilt can reveal a person looming above someone else, or follow a glance towards a window.

Ask a simple question before each move: what does the audience learn or feel because the camera moves?

If the answer is “that we hired a gimbal”, reconsider.

6. Mistaking a hook for permanent hysteria

Yes, you need to give people a reason to keep watching.

That reason can be curiosity.

A woman arrives home and finds her own coat hanging in the hallway. She is still wearing it.

No explosion required.

Vertical storytelling can benefit from an immediate, readable situation. But immediate does not have to mean loud. Nor does every pause need to be punished with another cut.

Build attention through questions, desire, conflict and changing information.

For a series, make the episode’s ending grow from its drama: a discovery, a decision, a consequence.

A cliffhanger should make the viewer care what happens next. Constant noise can make them grateful when it stops.

7. Waiting for permission from the old system

There is always another obstacle available.

You need an agent. A better camera. A financier. Someone important to announce that your idea is legitimate.

Meanwhile, you could make a small piece that demonstrates it.

Shoot a complete sixty-second vertical story: one location, two performers, a clear desire and a consequence.

Show it to five people who might actually enjoy that kind of work. Ask where they became interested, where they became confused and what they remembered.

Then make another.

You will learn from those answers. You will also have evidence of what you can do.

From Elliot’s Notebook

Equipment matters. Craft matters more than the prestige attached to the equipment.

I want filmmakers to discover what a frame can do, whether it fills a cinema wall or fits in somebody’s hand.

This weekend, give yourself one constraint: use the camera you have. Write something that makes that camera useful.

Finish it.

And once you have, submit your vertical film to our new festival.

The next lens can wait.

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