The Future of Cinema Is in the Past 

One of the best film criticism channels right now

Film history, film technique, delivered with jokes and quality editing through the whole video. I can feel my brain growing.

You sir are genius cause not only am I learning actual film techniques and whys, you give it with hilarious comedic edit additions and a flare of personality. You show your interest and critic you don’t just talk like you know everything. God that’s rare on RU-vid.

Absolute riot of a video. As someone who constantly talks about composition and nobody cares, this felt like discovering an old friend

I think what Zack Snyder meant to say was superheros (and supervillains) are larger-than-life characters, and a taller frame is better for emphasizing that. When you have a character like Superman or Darkseid, who are tall and broad-shouldered, filming them in 4:3 allows them to dominate the frame with minimal unused space to their left and right, thereby making them look bigger. The counterexample would be Battlefield Earth, which features nine-foot-tall aliens called Psychlos. The movie was shot in scope for no reason other than that's what people expected movies to look like at the time, so any time a Psychlo appears in a wide shot, the camera has to be pulled really far back to fit them in the frame, and this consequently makes them appear smaller while showing too much of the environment which they're not filling up. Thus, these characters who are supposed to be huge and intimidating don't appear so. I suspect the filmmakers realized this to some degree, so they tried to reintroduce some verticality to their frame by tilting the camera, and then they tried to play it off like it was a stylistic decision and just made the whole movie Dutch angles.

This is thought provoking and challenging. I'm going to take a while to consider it, then re-watch the video to see if I agree. This is why your channel is so good. It treats us as adults, and trusts us to be able to grasp more difficult concepts. Or at least concepts that may not be all that familiar to us. Well done.

Your channel is addictive. I'm daily watching at least one video. It's like youtubers have forgotten how to make a video essay on movies.

Just discovered your channel. Excellent work. Brilliant insights. Please keep going.

Actually I love the cinemascope productions from the 50s, I wish more films and directors would use this format as well.

I’m a scope fanboy. Some months ago I was watching “Cold War” and I was stunned of the way it looked, so I started shooting in OpenGate 4:3 spherical lenses. Then I watch this analysis… In two weeks, I’ll shoot a short film. I will rethink every frame and leave the anamorphics for other time. This insight is what I needed. Thank you very much.

Smart to use vertical in the shootout scenes. The people who have the high ground had an advantage.

Barbie was shot 2 to 1 on Alexa 65. It looked great on the big screen. There was one especially artful shot halfway thru, (*very slight spoiler)where there is a room, framed in complete blackness on the top and sides, but on the bottom, the light from the room spills down, reflecting on the floor, extending out of this frame. It was mesmerizing.

Discovered your channel thanks to RU-vid suggestions. Let the videos rolling. Thought I was in a hundred thousands views per video channel, and was shocked that you don't have more views. Quality of your videos is off the charts, it's really clever, precise and full of cinema lessons. Even the description of the video is well written and seriously treated. Thanks for sharing this knowledge and points of views, truly interesting and valuable.

Recently found this channel. Binged all of the videos in two days. Came back to see if I missed any and to rewatch. Low and behold, a new video! Thanks movie wise!

There has been a similar revolution in comics, that comics used to always be read left to right (or right to left for manga). Now they are up to down, as most reading is down on a phone. Most webcomic sites now offer vertical scroll.

Another interesting lesson! Thanks!

I don't know your film making background, but this is incredibly insightful and useful. Thanks.

So glad to see that I am not alone in my judgement of the willful carnage wrought by film directors. I often re-watch movies just to grade the shooting, the props, camera motion, and editing cut flubs. Thanks Moviewise, for the fun.

Finally! Someone has agreed with me on Chris Nolan. I’ve always thought he made pretty good movies. But the directing wasn’t the reason for their quality. There is no way Nolan is on a level of directing with the likes of-let’s say-John Ford, one of the most unrecognized greatest directors of all time. By the way, I think you are on the cusp of something big. High quality will eventually be discovered. Your channel is going to blow up soon.

Holed up in my room today sick and been binging your videos. Loved to see a new one just now!

So happy to see a new video from you so soon!

I'm so thankful for your videos. You're really showing the rest of us how it's done.

This really is the first channel where I actually start to understand directing. Really the best and funniest channel on the topic!

When I started the video with the information that it would be about aspect ratios, I expected it to put me to sleep. Instead I feel I learned a lot and have a better appreciation for framing in film. Thank you.

You have succeeded in bringing your point across in an efficient way, without trying to make an independent movie modernising the use of classical film ratio which will embitter you after it gets buried and archived by Barbenheimer/ Fast and the transformers... or other. Great work.

The "half a thing at a time" got me. That was good.

I have learned more watching this channel than in 4 years of Video film production in School...wow I will look at everything differently now, I love the Academy ratio, depth and the height.

I've always said this for all art, if you want to predict the future look to the past! Great video man

You are so informtive and engrossing. We learn new things with each video. Thanks!

Brilliant video. The way you visualise the information with all the examples works extremely well.

This channel is amazing! Can’t wait to watch it blow up.

This is the best video essay on Cinematography I have ever seen! I am now a subscriber; Thank You!

Thank you for creating these videos-- some of the most original and insightful cinema content I have ever come across. Simon

Just found this channel the other day through the video on I, Claudius. I've spent the last two weeks watching everything and regret nothing. Looking forward to what you do next!

Great video keep ‘em coming

Great content man keep it coming

An important insight which is true to many fields. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and making us just a bit smarter. At least moviewise Can't wait for the next one!

I think what’s really rad about this channel is you do a really great job expressing your love for movies without being incredibly pompous with your opinions or criticisms. Keep it up man.

When you showed the Snyder quote about superheroes tending to be vertical, I was like ... "aaaannnnnd?" ... And then you went there. lol.

Keep these great videos coming.

really enjoyed that, I learned so much about films, thanks😁

Bro... You made me rethink the 4/3 photography format.

I just found your channel. No hyperbole here. This is one of the best videos I have ever seen

Such a great video!

Amazing video as always

Love this channel and your sense of humor! I watched this one three times and chuckled to the change of Titanic music every time. Keep them coming!

Entertaining and informing. Truly perfect

in videogames you do this primarily for performance. the black areas don´t need to be rendered and you have more memory for the actual image and you can add more detail

This channel is becoming more based with each upload. Never allow blocking and framing to become a lost art!

My new favorite channel.

My take on the abysmal state of cinema screening tables right now is: Hollywood's approach to film making right now is avoiding financial risks at all (creative, craftsmanship, idiosyncratic, inspirational, intellectual, original) costs. It is suits running a business with an artform they don't know anything about, could not care less for, and yet don't trust actual artists enough to let them do their thing. There are so-called "original movies", few and far between, still being made, but even most of these feel like modular painting by trope numbers and references to similar movies of the genre. Even with these "somewhat original" movies, Hollywood is not going to take any risks. The Matrix, District 9, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Inception, Elysium, Logan, Joker, Ad Astra, Willy's Wonderland, The Dead Don't Die are such films - good movies per se, but all resembling stories and conceptual ideas we had seen on film before. I just wish more of these "somewhat original" movies were going further in trying out something new, pushing topical boundaries as well as exploring the artform, and went way beyond being modular remixes of truly original movies that have already proven successful time and time again. Hollywood not allowing for original pitches that do not reference past successes, makes for a cinematic world where "mildly entertaining" has become about the best I can hope for in a mainstream movie. (And that is sad. Even more so, when arthouse movies are becoming fewer and farther between each season. At least where I live, which is not a mega-city.) The only films that still felt fresh to me in recent years (one or two decades back) were: Persepolis, Loving Vincent, Captain Fantastic, The Kids Are All Right, Only Lovers Left Alive, Still Alice, The VVitch, Beasts of No Nation, Moonlight, Cam, Mandy, All These Small Moments, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Parasite, System Crasher, The Lighthouse, Booksmart, Linoleum, We Don't Dance For Nothing, Brothers, Parsley, Way Out Ahead of Us, The Northman, Pig, Renfield, Barbie. About a third of these movies I had to travel a day and stay over night to attend film festivals for - or I would never have been able to watch them at a movie theatre. That is an average of about two fresh and original movies (that left an impression) per year (only 2 per year, dammit!) across ALL genres - and I had to go to great lengths to attend them. In the second half of the nineties - at a small town cinema - I got the same amount out of the genre of science fiction alone - masterpieces such as: Gattaca, Ghost in the Shell, eXistenZ, 13th Floor, Dark City, Strange Days; and a bit more pedestrian, yet also quite entertaining and unique in style: Alien Resurrection, The Matrix, Event Horizon, Escape From L. A., Lost in Space, The Fifth Element. So, what's the matter with cinema today? Here is an interesting analysis with which I can agree on many points: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RQF82Kj-v0E.htmlsi=kFK9ysccEcrChM-k

Very good video. Thank You Sir.

The algo be praised for suggesting me this. The competence, the rhythm, the excellent humour (the bipeds thing just floored me), and - why not - the accent.. top. Bashing Nolan & Snyder at the same time: priceless! Have a great weekend!

Informative and hilarious. I rarely subscribe to a channel after watching just one video. This is one.

Amazing video! Love your work, educational and funny

I've been trying to articulate why Nolan doesn't impress me for years. THANK YOU!

12:52 i wonder if that extra open window was intentional to account for normal theaters

Very interesting video, must pay more attention to your channel

Amazinglly put.....very informative. RIP Zack.

I really hope you channel blows up. The amount of USEFUL information in each video is astounding. Keep up the great work. Instant sub from me.

The trend will be whatever fits a smart phone screen, with everything shot in extreme close up so people can see it. Great video, I had never really thought much about how aspect effects camera work and story telling. 10/10

Nice video. Of course, now televisions are universally 'wide', there is no need to frame compositions with how they will transfer to television in mind. There are no excuses for lazy, half-arsed framing and blocking any more! I'm off to see what Jim Emerson said about Nolan.

This was both insightful and hilarious. Thank you.

So interesting! Man I'm glad I came across this channel.

Ahh that explains why some 'cinematic' scenese felt so tight and like heads were always getting cut off. This makes it all make so much more sense.

Brilliant stuff Thank you

My new favorite film channel!

Why not just go 16:9, it works perfectly well for vertical and horizontal staging while filling up the entirety of the most common TV and monitor screen aspect ratio in existence. You can then stage scenes utilizing both compositional languages without having to jump around between them like in Nolan's movies. It's perfect for streaming, perfect for IMAX (and if cropping is used to utilize IMAX aspect ratio, it's not as extreme as going from IMAX to cinemascope), and perfect for a normal cinema screen. Just look at Cronenbergs movies, almost all were shot in 1.85:1 and they're perfect in both cinema and on modern 16:9 TVs. IMAX shot movies are perfect for IMAX, but since the rest of the world aren't looking at screens in that aspect ratio, it would be much better to just reshape IMAX screens to 5:3 or 16:9 instead. Since TVs are also much bigger today without taking up space, it's going to get more common having a large home cinema screen. It also works great for people watching movies on their phones, but they can go to hell and shouldn't be adapted towards.

Absolutely great video

Instructive and entertaining, made me laugh out loud.

Excellent video

I thought when snyder was talking about superheroes being vertical he was talking about how the comic page is shaped. A comic page is so often when you see superheroes in comics with single page art work or if uou are looking at the cover everything tends to be vertical and stacked.

Best film channel right now by far

This is my favorite RU-vid channel.

very enlightening and convincing. A lot of what you said I knew subconsciously but could never quite put my finger on it. Something seemed off but I wasn't sure why. Then when seeing those clips of Inception, I kept thinking "That's great in Academy!" and then realized it was in scope and stuff cut off. Inception really would have been better in Academy. So much fit into tight, square-shaped, area anyway and little to no landscapes. Scope served no purpose in it.

You made me want to watch a motion picture whose aspect ratio changes, instead of staying the same from start to finish.

all this time ive wondered why i love imax so much, but now i think im realizing its mainly academy ratio i love

This has really affected the way I watch movies. Now I can't stop thinking about this with every movie I watch. I saw It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World a few days ago. I noticed in every shot the actors' faces were wholly in frame. The giant W was perfect in frame. Then when I watched Till, I noticed the same thing. Faces in frame, and when the widescreen left a gap, it was always filled with something. Usually large props, like a vase or piece of furniture. Sometimes the gap would be filled with a door way which someone would soon use. It made me appreciate the film more.

Great stuff. Thanks.

The fact that you can exactly say what wrong from bad to great director is doing is marvellous. It's easy to spot the blunder of the movie is bad but really hard when done in good movies. But not only that you are able explain your point very well. That's some skill. Thanks for sharing your deep knowledge. Just a recommendation can you make a video on Raj Kumar Hirani and Sanjay Leela Bhansali movies. They r some of the renowned Bollywood (Indian Hindi language movie) directors of current time.

An amazing use of Scope (2.55:1 in this case) is Disney's Lady and the Tramp. Dogs are horizontal, and the whole film is told from their perspective. We pretty much never see humans above the waist.

Excellent work sir 👏

My favorite square movie in recent years is Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse" in spectacularly grim 1.19:1. I loved that shape so much I saw it twice on a giant screen. The dripping **** scene would been much less ******** in scope.

You deserve waaaaaay more Subscrbrs ..... excellent channel

Absolute classic video!!!

My dude you've earned yourself a subscriber. I'm on an official film course right now and none of the points from your videos are explored

You know else tends to be more vertical: bipeds! Love it.

I wish 4:3 would become the norm again, first for laptops and then for big home screens.

Great stuff.

The thing about Snyder's comment is, though he's articulating it about as well as Snyder articulates anything (more's the pity) I kinda understand what he's getting at. Comics pages are, of course, vertical as opposed to horizontal, so there's a particular iconic image that recurs of the towering hero, standing out in front of their page and their story in such a way as to express their iconic nature. Iconography is absolutely essential to superheroes. They usually wear logos that come to mean whatever value or theme the character represents. And even if they don't have a logo per se, the characters themselves almost always have an iconic appearance. There's James Bond in his tux, but then there's Batman with his ears, cape, and bat logo. Or even Wolverine with his distinct hairstyle, steel claws, and animalistic expression. Anyone can wear a tux. No one looks like Wolverine but Wolverine. In comics, the splash page, or just a vertical full figure panel, appears frequently to present the character's iconic image. This image delivers the product of the comic, a character who's an iconic representation of their story's theme, with accompanying story to reinforce or challenge that theme. So I get that Snyder wanted to capture the towering, iconic image of superheroes, standing taller than their story. Not all characters need that, regardless of being bipeds that happen to stand vertically. But superheroes as a genre can really benefit from it.

Thank you for this. I thought I was crazy. All those widescreen formatted movies and still there’s letterboxing, like I thought widescreen meant it was supposed to fit my tv properly.

I really like your channel and insights! To me the biggest challenge is keeping the objects big enough, i.e. screen size. If movie screens were much bigger, more like IMAX, I think it would be easier for audiences to embrace the squarer format again. But there is tremendous inertia behind all our movie theaters being designed and built for widescreen, so projecting squarer looks smaller. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Would be great to have more theaters with the screen size like IMAX but maybe not tied to a proprietary film type, so the aspect ratio could be taken advantage of more...Otherwise people's heads and faces start to look really small on the screen... Need taller screens! So the industry would need to start building bigger screens that allow for the classic aspect ratio. Certainly 16x9 is a bit squareer than the old cinema scope, so perhaps that will help filmmakers not get too wide, but there is a notion that "more is better" that really takes hold in the public and executives minds. You flashed Jurassic Park a couple times and at least that used 16x9 (1.78:1) recognizing the need for verticality more than the super wide formats that are like 2.1:1.

Inception is my fav film of all time. I didn't care about "off frames" then and not even now. These are good for academic purposes but the masses don't care.

hilarious and informing - great video!

Interesting. Essentially, plan your shots, design etc to compliment the chosen ratio. At least the varied ratios used in a single film are starting to be applied to dvd or streaming now

You're a great teacher.

The issue with different ratios is that cinemas will always fight them. As it's just easier for them to have 1 and the same ratio for every film instead of adjusting. This goes for PC/TV screens as well, but to a lesser extent. I could definitely see the academy ratio coming back, that is after the Hollywood gets out of the dark ages we are in now. I feel the Zack Snyder point is actually the most important one even if he himself does not seem to understand it. Humans by nature are more vertical, therefore the only way a horizontal ratio makes sense is if you have multiple people next to each other or very far away. But then again the start of you video shows perfectly how beautiful shots, that showcase distance can be achieved vertically as well. I have a feeling your channel will blow up soon keep up the good work.

I hope to god we don’t have a vertical trend. I WILL RESIST!

I'd be curious to see a video analysis of TV movies and how the limitations of 4:3 and a small screen affected the directors' choices.

If a significant financial benefit of the wide screen comes from more aisles, and hence more seats, you might be right. fewer public viewings might alter the format, and the overwide television screens will feature "cinematic" black bars on the sides.