As a filmmaker, the screen is your canvas, whether you’re making a movie for a tablet, a television, or a big cinema screen. You are responsible for understanding how the canvas can be used. At times, you will be required to use it in a certain way—for example, when you are hired to do a job, such as to make a television commercial, for which specific images need to be captured exactly as planned. At other times, you will have more authority and will be able to exercise more creative freedom in your choices. Either way, it is up to you to make the film look as if every image in every shot is the right one needed to develop the characters and tell the story. Your goal is to make the film work and to give the audience a seamless experience (see Producer Smarts: Creative Discussion about the Look of the Film, below). To achieve a quality final product, it always helps to know where you are headed; the first thing to figure out is what shape your final film will be. This is called the aspect ratio.

Aspect Ratios and Formats

Just as a painter needs to decide what size and shape a painting should be, the filmmaker must determine what the film should look like. The first consideration is the film’s aspect ratio. The word aspect means “appearance,” and a ratio compares two things. The aspect ratio is the relationship between width and height of the screen image. But unlike a painter, who can stretch a canvas to any size and even decide if it will be higher than it is wide, the filmmaker has few choices. Movies come in standard sizes, which have evolved and changed over the last one hundred years. These standards are often called formats because they have clearly defined size and shape characteristics. (Later in this chapter, you’ll encounter the word format used in terms of cameras; the important thing to remember is that a format is just a way of saying that something is standardized.)

Figure 6.1 shows how the same image looks different in different aspect ratios. You’ll see that with a smaller aspect ratio, the image looks more square, and as the aspect ratio widens, you can see more information on the sides.

Your choice of aspect ratio will be driven by both creative and commercial considerations—what will look best artistically, and where your film is going to be distributed (see Action Steps: Shooting for Multiple Formats, below). For example, if your film is destined to play in cinemas, you can shoot in 1.85 or 2.40 aspect ratios. But if you’re planning to show your movie on a YouTube channel, you’ll want to shoot it in YouTube format (1.78). Wes Anderson’s 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, uses three different aspect ratios to indicate different time periods, and it is a perfect way to explore the ways aspect ratios change how much of a scene you can see.

Although some cameras have settings that give you a choice between wide screen and standard formats, what the camera manufacturer means by these words isn’t always the same as what’s standard in filmmaking. You need to shoot something in each format and look for yourself, or check the manufacturer’s specifications manual. On mobile-phone cameras, “widescreen” simply means 16 × 9. (Aspect ratios are often described as “this number by that number.” It is simply another way of explaining the ratio. In this example, 16 × 9 is another way of saying 1.78 [because 16 ÷ 9 = 1.78].) In movies, the ones you see in the cinema, widescreen is anything wider than 1.85—that is, wider than a cell-phone screen—and conveys a sense of epic scope.

Widescreen is often used for stories that have large-scale scenery or settings: movies that take place in nature or in eye-popping, invented worlds, or movies that depict the extreme loneliness of characters dwarfed against a landscape. Widescreen can also make more intimate movies feel less claustrophobic; if a movie takes place entirely in confined spaces, a widescreen approach can give the film a sense of scale, making a “small movie” seem large. Widescreen can seem grandiose, whereas a narrower format, such as 1.33, can direct the audience’s attention more toward the characters and their relationships with one another than on their relationship to the film’s physical setting.

Special Formats: 3D Stereoscopic and Giant Screen

We’ve explored the conventional size and shape of most films, but there are two important formats that fall outside the norm: 3D stereoscopic and giant screen. These formats have gained increasing popularity in recent years, and there are more than 50,000 3D stereoscopic–enabled cinema screens worldwide. A small but growing number of student filmmakers are now experimenting with 3D, aided by offers of inexpensive equipment rentals from certain equipment manufacturers and the encouragement of the International 3D Society, among others.

3D stereography is a process that creates a visual illusion of dimensionality by showing two different images, one for the right eye and one for the left eye, mimicking the way our eyes perceive depth with stereoscopic vision. There are numerous methods for achieving this—depending on your resources, equipment, and skill level, it can be achieved during production with stereoscopic image capture, or it can be “created” in postproduction using sophisticated processes. Either way the concept is the same. Two images are recorded or created simultaneously, one for each eye; the images are filmed or manufactured from slightly different positions or perspectives, just as a person’s eyes see from two slightly different positions. The images are then projected separately onto the same screen. To the naked eye, when combined on-screen, they look blurred and out of alignment. But special 3D glasses worn by the viewer align everything and direct each image to the correct eye, where the brain pieces them together to give the illusion of depth. Recent advances in technology have brought 3D films into the mainstream: Better cameras and rigs permit more seamless capture of 3D imagery on set or in the field, and better postproduction tools tweak that imagery as needed; new tools and processes take 2D imagery and convert it into a finished 3D movie during what is sometimes called the dimensionalization process; and the widespread availability of improved digital projectors make it much less expensive to show 3D movies at higher quality.

If your film will be shown in 3D, your creative challenge is to use the added depth in your canvas, sometimes referred to as z-depth or z-axis, to enhance character and story development and not simply as a gimmick. At present, how studios are using 3D in feature films seems to be divided on this point. Some 3D films hardly add any storytelling value—they simply add the technique for its “wow” value by throwing things out at the audience, such as in The Three Musketeers (2011). Others—like Avatar (2009), Hugo (2011), and Gravity (2013)—use 3D to its full dramatic potential, carefully controlling the depth of objects or people on set for creative purposes. In these instances, 3D expands the visual vocabulary. Hugo, in particular, was notable because it was one of the first and most respected studio feature films to seamlessly incorporate 3D into a non-action-oriented, dramatic story.

Giant screen is an inclusive term that applies to IMAX and other large-format theaters, planetariums, theme parks, and dome theaters that make the viewing of a movie more immersive, with the screen filling the audience’s entire field of view (and sometimes more). IMAX is a brand name for movies made in a format created and controlled by the IMAX Corporation; it now includes both the traditional IMAX giant screens and some larger multiplex screens that have been retrofitted to incorporate some elements of the giant screens. There are more than eight hundred IMAX venues worldwide. Full IMAX films are projected either digitally or on film that’s twice the size of a normal film frame, and have an aspect ratio of 1.44:1 (though many IMAX screens, particularly the less gigantic ones, play movies in other aspect ratios, too). The great drawing power of IMAX is its size—the largest IMAX screen is one hundred feet wide. Many studios tentpole movies (see Chapter 14.) are enlarged to play on IMAX screens simultaneously with their release on conventional screens because they create a different viewing experience for the audience—a premium experience that some people will pay more to see.