A friend recently shared this video from Kendra Gaylord, describing how your favorite movie is vertical now, courtesy of #AI —and what is lost in the process:
In movies, every time something is filmed, it’s memorializing a lot: the actors, the location, the way we talk and write and joke. Even though it’s fiction, it’s still a document, and if you mess with that document too much, it doesn’t represent all of those things anymore.
One of the most perverse revelations here is that the AI-generated version felt more realistic to people simply by virtue of being vertical; the same aspect ratio in which we experience social media videos. Our window to reality is portrait-shaped.