"Make Video Horizontal Again" - Trucker Hat

It’s July 2018.

The sun rises on a warm, summer day.

You’ve got a shoot today (and it’s a big one).

You throw on your lucky underwear, load up your gear, and drive over to the shoot location.

The entire day could be described as “a movie.”

You are in the zone.

Directing, filming, slugging energy drinks. You even tried that 360 gimbal roll you saw on Tik Tok.

And you nailed it.

As the sun sets on a magical shoot day you exclaim “That’s a wrap!”

“Spielberg shit” you whisper to yourself.

As you are loading out, dragging the final Pelican out to your car, the client comes over to you for a chat.

She thanks you for your expertise today.

“One last thing” she says.

“We’d love it if you could edit all the footage from today into vertical 9x16 videos.”

“Oh no…” you think to yourself.

“I know we had originally said horizontal but we are really trying to make a push on this new platform called Tik Tok and the marketing director is on my ass about going vertical.”

Your heart sinks.

But you force a smile, and laugh sheepishly “No problem! That’s the way the world is going, isn’t it?”

The drive home is a dark one.

The sun is down.

You decide not to play any music in the car, it wouldn’t sound good anyway.

You get home and head over to your editing station.

You slide the crisp plastic of the SD card into the awaiting dongle.

Footage imported.

It's time to create a sequence.

Your mouse hovers over the horizontal 16x9 option.

Time freezes. *gulp*

1 second passes, then 5.

Your heart starts to break as you move your cursor down the options list to Satan’s aspect ratio, 9x16.

*click*

With your new awkwardly tall sequence set up, you begin hacking together an edit.

It’s not pretty.

Triple-stacked frames. 250% zooms. 90-degree rotations.

Anything you can do to fill out this horribly tall frame.

You work through the night.

As the summer sun rises, you export.

Finally.

You send it over to the client.

They respond instantly.

They LOVE it. They love how vertical it is.

But you hate yourself. And you hate vertical video.

You walk through the vertical door frame to your room and collapse onto your vertical bed.

You drift off into a slumber where you dream of horizontal video.

But alas, it is just a dream.

The end.