Posted

Dec 15th 2009

Mood

Tired

Music

Theme to Gone With the Wind

There's a movie that's going to be on next week called How the West Was Won, starring Jimmy Stewart. I've been wanting to see this movie for a while now because it was shot in three-strip Cinerama (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinerama). Cinerama was an extremely wide aspect ratio that used a three projector system to show a film. This give a feeling of being able to see an extreme amount of whats to the sides of whats being shot.

On that note, I'm an aspect ratio whore. To me, when making a flash, the wider the better. I constantly size my templates to aspect ratios wider than 16:9. Ecopoiesis is 2.39:1, which is one of today's film industry's standards. One of the first times I added letterboxing to a flash I ended up using a 3.33:1 ratio for it (I had eventually gone back and measured it).

To me it's better to play with the canvas/camera. It's also a challenge at times to make what you need work on something that's not tall enough to accommodate what's being animated/filmed. That being said, and maybe it's just me not looking hard enough, I'm kind of disheartened to not seen more animations put into wider aspect ratios. I understand that 16:9 is standard, but letterboxing can easily fix that.

I don't know, this is just something that's been on my mind. I'm working on an animation that's done in 16:9 right now and it's sometimes not enough for what I want to do. Other times it's good because I have a really tall character and really short character on screen at the same time.

Is anyone else a fan of wider aspect ratios?