Screenwriting : With Micro Dramas, Function may follow Form by Sebastian Tudores

I did a little experiment to see if something that was shot for 16:9 could easily be reframed for vertical without losing original intent - I found a few interesting things I thought I would share:

- some of the dialogue lines landed better (in my opinion) simply because of the adjusted composition on screen

- if you were close up in landscape, you will go MACRO on reframing for vertical. So when you do your own samples using a phone, for example, don't forget to shoot it/frame it vertically from the start

- the tone changes for me quite a bit. In this week's Writer's Room Breakdown Webcast, Michael Schulman described the trending viewing preferences as searching for something like "the intimacy of a novel" - besides being a beautiful description, I can see, post this little experiment, how a vertical framing can get you there.. not like in my experiment though where we get right up their nose haha. but it gave me the sense of what that might be for this vertical composition.

All in all - I think they meant it when they said this format requires its own guides/rules/conventions. Pretty exciting.

The other reason I wanted to share this is to perhaps show that things don't need to be perfect to try getting some of your scenes shot and edited for POCs or just to visualize. When I did this bit, I actually paid around $500 to have a cinematographer and his audio recording buddy come in and shoot this is in half-day. As for the actors, Kevin was a buddy of mine and for Michael I did do a casting and did pay him an Ultra Low SAG rate even though this was obviously not a SAG production. But beautiful things happen when we respect our colleagues :)

If I was doing this today, an iPhone and Premiere Pro / DaVinci is all I would have needed.

Has anyone else tried reframing some of their existing projects? Or got their friends together and bullied them into being actors for the day to try out some scenes you wrote? Would love to hear about the experience.

[ The original landscape scene is attached to this post. And you can watch the reframe here: https://www.stage32.com/media/3951361911743848803?ref=search ]