Everything I Knew About Shooting Got Flipped 90 Degrees
My son's at film school studying trad cinema. Meanwhile, media is trending vertical. Instead of using a tripod and the Blackmagic app to shoot anamorphic, should he prop his phone against a coffee mug and capture close-ups in a 9:16 frame?
I grew up worshipping Spielberg's horizons and getting lost in massive Panavision frames. When I was on Lost and Hannibal, we obsessed over cinematic scope and tableau. Now Gen Z is making feature length movies in a frame that's basically a column of light, and it's forcing me to rethink everything I know about visual storytelling.
The Vertical Shift
Have you seen these vertical micro-dramas? I’ve been rabbit-holing YouTube at 2 AM. Going on ReelShort binges. Taking notes like I'm back at The American Film Institute.
The vertical frame isn't just cinema turned sideways. It's a completely different beast. You lose the geographic sprawl of widescreen, but you gain this intense intimacy that's kind of insane. Faces become landscapes. The corner of an eye carries the weight of an entire establishing shot. A clenched jaw does what a car chase used to do. It’s old school Soap Opera 100x.
9:16 Tip #1: Close-Ups Are King
In vertical, close-ups aren't just part of your coverage, they are your coverage. We're talking 60 to 80 percent close-ups. On Alias, maybe 40 percent of our shots were close-ups, and the network thought JJ was being bold. When he brought this approach to Mi:3, the studio freaked.
JJ fought for every sliver of intimacy between all the spy action. We’d build whole emotional turns around a glance or a half-smile before cutting back to chaos. These vertical stories start there. Intimacy is the default setting. Every scene feels like the tight-shot bunker conversation we used to earn with ten pages of setup.
Some V-Dramas let the entire emotional arc play out in the left eye of the actress. Just her left eye. And it kinda works. It’s an iteration on the living room intimacy of OG TV. The idea of forging a connection between the audience and the actor.
9:16 Tip #2: The Three-Second Rule
Cut every three seconds. That's the V-Drama rule. At first, I thought this was ADD editing (and hey, as someone with ADD, I’m glad to feel seen). But it's actually about matching the swipe-scroll rhythm of how people consume content on their phones.
It's exhausting and exhilarating like the best Michael Bay epic. Like scripting action sequences for 90 minutes straight. No breathing room. Just constant forward momentum. The editor’s Premiere timeline must be full of enough clips to make their Mac Studio huff ‘n puff.
9:16 Tip #3: Think Up and Down, Not Side to Side
Apparently, camera moves should be vertical, not horizontal. Because people scroll up and down, their brains are primed for vertical movement. A slow pan down creates dread. A rise up signals revelation. I’d love editors like Walter Murch or Thelma Schoonmaker to weigh in on this. Along with shooters like Greig Fraser. Feels like we’re gonna need some new Studio Binders on the cinematic grammar of 9:16.
The 20-60-20 Rule
V-Dramas have three storytelling tracks running simultaneously in one narrow frame.
Top 20% of frame: The symbolic stuff. Light sources, ceiling fans, the thing lurking above. It's where mood lives.
Middle 60%: The face. The emotion. The human connection. This is your jam on toast.
Bottom 20%: The details. The gun on the table. The trembling hand. The text message. It’s in these inserts that the plot happens.
Performer Performance Rewired
Theater kids raised on Glee and Hamilton will struggle with this format. They're trained to project, to play to the back row. But when the camera's basically performing surgery on your face, that training becomes a liability.
The format demands emotional precision. Every blink, breath, and twitch becomes story data. Elizabeth Dulau's Mona Lisa smile in Andor season 2 is the tip of the nuance iceberg here.
But – Some people watch micro-dramas at 1.5x or 2x speed. WTF? So actors have to make gestures that read when accelerated. It's like anime timing but with real humans. As someone who grew up on Speed Racer and badly dubbed kaiju movies, this could work for me. Hmmm..
Genre in a Vertical World
Romance is currently the genre paying the bills for any V-Drama experiments. It works because you're basically living inside the kiss.
What about Horror? It could be terrifying in vertical as there's nowhere to hide. You can't check the corners of the frame for the monster because there are no corners. It's just this narrow column where threats can only suddenly appear from above or below.
Action might be a fail because you lose the horizontal geography of a fight, but you would gain visceral proximity to impact.
Science fiction might be the trickiest. How do you show scope in vertical? I’ve seen a few experimental animations on Instagram that suggest it’s possible. But maybe the future of sci-fi on V-Drama isn't about scale but about intimacy. The human face processing the infinite.
An Old Dog, New Tricks
Twenty-plus years in TV, and I thought I had a handle on visual storytelling. But this vertical vibe is teaching me that I've been thinking in one aspect ratio my whole career.
When you can't hide behind spectacle or sprawling master shots, every beat has to earn its place. It's like the difference between composing a symphony and ripping a killer three-minute alt-punk track. Both are valid, but they demand different instincts.
My son's generation won’t see this as a limitation. For them, verticals will be valid cinema. They're native speakers of this new visual language. I'm still a tourist with a phrase book.
But that's the thrill of being creative, right? Just when you think you've cracked the scribblers code, someone flips the frame 90 degrees and suddenly you're a film student again. That’s the gig. The joy rising. Cracking open new ways to spin yarns, one screen rotation at a time.
