“Vertical Cinema” Is Apple's Take On Hollywood

With Vertical Cinema, Apple is revisiting Hollywood’s greatest genres and how they might have looked in with vertical framing.

If you are going to make a video using your phone, chances are that you will shoot vertically. It not only feels more natural when using your phone, but Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have made vertical video the standard for homemade content.

Yet, vertical has remained a no-go format for many video professionals, and ad agencies, who continue to ignore the trends and view landscape as the only valid format for storytelling.

As the flag-bearer of vertical video, Apple decided it was time to showcase how the format could, in fact, improve storytelling. And what better than Hollywood’s greatest to make a point?

“Vertical Cinema” is a 9-minute reimagining of Hollywood history, entirely shot vertically on an iPhone 11 Pro.

The film was imagined by TBWA\Media Arts Lab and directed by Oscar-winner Damien Chazelle, who wrote and directed 2016’s La La Land.

As a good Hollywood story “Vertical Cinema” features an unlikely hero, a stuntman to be precise, for whom everything works out in the end, as he finds himself dropped in a silent movie, am Indiana-Jones-style adventure, a Western, an action movie and more.

“Vertical Cinema” is a work of art. But it also does an impressive job of showing how vertical is better in some cases like closeups or framing faces. And of course, as such, it also is a fantastic ad for the iPhone 11 and its camera.

The campaign also released a behind-the-scenes video where Chazelle said the process gave him a far deeper appreciation for the phone and for the largely untapped potential of vertical video.

“There’s the accessibility of the phone,” the director said, “that hopefully, a little movie like this throws a few ideas out there that people can then play with literally on their own or at home or in their backyards.”