At 22 Frith Street in London there’s a plaque commemorating the first demonstration of moving images not involving film. A purist might point out that John Logie Baird’s television system was a mechanical monstrosity which could never have achieved even standard definition. Either way, those early experiments produced a dim, low-resolution image which was updated at less than ten frames per second—and was portrait in aspect ratio.
So, the fascination with tall, thin movies on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat might seem less like a new idea than a reincarnation of a very old one. The demand for material which works in those portrait frames isn’t really new, although a lot of what’s been released in portrait formats has been repurposed, sometimes rather approximately, from conventional landscape pictures.
