She had not planned to be a pioneer. To tell the truth, at the start, the director Camille Ducellier was even a little reluctant. Shooting this series in vertical format was an idea of its producer, Romain Bonnin: he wanted to offer it to a fashionable app, a platform distributed only on smartphones. And then, as it was a question of transidentity, he thought it wise to “deconstruct formats”. There was some consistency.
The chief operator, Camille Langlois, was not “not enchanted” either by the perspective of delivering vertical images. She dreaded “a not very cinematic rendering”. But when the two Camilles got together to try out in a Brussels skatepark, “a world has opened up”. They understood that by changing the direction of the camera, they were also mourning their reflexes. They plunged into the joy of trial and error and invention.
Suddenly, they realized, “classic plans are much less so, all the frames become a pretext to play”. The vertical format, they testify, is “creator of sensations, shifts, strange effects”. An example ? “Vertically, when you film a person lying down from above, you may have the impression that they are standing, it creates something strange. »
CHEF FEa documentary series directed by Camille Ducellier, won the “New Writing Prize” awarded by SCAM during FIPADOC 2020.
Together, the two young women shot three vertical series: Gender Derby (2018), Chief–do (2020) and Witch Lisa (2021). The first resorts willingly to split screen and effects; the third is more refined. These experiences bequeathed them certain certainties: if the horizontal suits groups, crowds, large movements and landscapes, the vertical highlights falls and ascents; the vertical is the king format for portraits, to show the human body, intimacy, and suggest interiority: the open air above the characters is conducive to daydreaming and spirituality; the vertical format is also effective for making abyss, suggesting passages and paths. “Filming vertically is like looking out the window”says Camille Langlois.
Torticollis
In August 2022, similar epiphanies took place in Nice. Ten young people were gathered in the “TikTok Academy of Creators” – a three-week training course provided by ENS Louis-Lumière at Studios de la Victorine and Villa Arson. “It’s very exciting because we’re not in our slippers”enthuses director Angela Soupe, who co-supervised this promo. “We have to find new solutions”, she says. And not to be prone to torticollis: “The filming equipment and our editing software were not suitable for vertical. As a result, we spent our time looking at the images with our heads tilted. »
When Camille Ducellier and Camille Langlois started out and wanted to understand ” the grammar ” vertical, the only inspirations they spotted had been gathered in Katoomba, in south-eastern Australia. It was there that a brother and a sister, both directors, Adam and Natasha Sébire, created the Vertical Film Festival in 2014 — on the sidelines of a climbing festival — to encourage their peers to explore the aesthetic potential of this format. At that time, deliberately filming vertically was considered a heresy. It could only be an accident, a symptom of ultimate awkwardness or digital illiteracy.
“I also did a square series. And if the subject lends itself to it, I would like to make a round film. »
Adam Sébire explained that it was time to break free from the standardization desired by the cinema industry and then by television manufacturers. “In 2019, I traveled around the world to give talks to Facebook creatives”, he says. Its subject: five hundred years of vertical imaging history. “My conclusion was that it’s silly to limit artists to one or two aspect ratios, especially in the digital age. Filmmakers should choose their format based on what they are trying to express. Sergei Eisenstein was already pleading in this direction in the early 1930s. Camille Ducellier says the same thing: “I also did a square series. And if the subject lends itself to it, I would like to make a round film. »
Today, Adam Sébire films the traces of climate change. He lives in a fjord, north of the Arctic Circle, and he has the precursor blues: “The brief era of exploring the possibilities of the vertical format is largely over, does he think, and that saddens me. »
habits
Some clues prove him right. Apps that had the ambition to become “Smartphone Netflix” (Blackpills, Quibi, Vertical…) and to stimulate the production of vertical series either closed prematurely or radically changed the project. Slash, France Télévisions’ digital offer aimed at young adults – which broadcast two of Camille Ducellier’s three series – did not “no more vertical creative projects”confides its director, Antonio Grigolini. “It is very complicated to justify heavy investments in creation for a part of the uses which remains limited, he advances. And then, politically, we do not want to finance creation for the benefit of platforms. » Neither the film industry nor the TV channels have any reason to change their habits. And video players remain massively configured for the horizontal.
On the other hand, the vertical triumphs over the networks. Better : “Our world is vertical”, enthuses Camille Duvelleroy. In addition to being the third Camille to appear in this article, this scriptwriter and director of interactive stories has the particularity of never having shot horizontally. She feels like the vertical “captures the living better”. And then, she simply finds it beautiful. Beautiful like a fashion photo. Beautiful like a movie poster. Beautiful like a smartphone in the palm of your hand.
“If you film wide, you lose empathy”
After designing a drawn soap opera broadcast on Instagram and an interactive documentary comic designed for mobiles, she produced Patience my love (2021), a series in 31 episodes broadcast as stories on the account art at follow, where the Franco-German channel regularly offers vertical series. Camille Duvelleroy played with the frame (“If you frame edge frame, and a character hits a wall, it looks like he’s touching the edge of the phone”) and “the gigantic off-screen of the vertical”. She excluded all wide shots because “if you film wide, you don’t see the faces of your characters and you lose empathy”. She says : “I don’t have time to lose the spectator.ice.s on emotion. » She rephrases: “On the networks, the public is very demanding, they need to understand in a very short time. »
Patience my lovedocumentary series in 31 episodes directed by Camille Duvelleroy.
three seconds
Because they are viewed massively on mobile, where a notification can at any time lead you to believe that you have something more urgent to do, vertical content implies strong narrative efficiency. “The first three seconds are uncompromising”insists the videographer Antton Racca (3.9 million subscribers on TikTok). “On Youtube, a video could work in the long term. On TikTok, it has to work right away, or it disappears. » So if a video posted on TikTok does not ” take “ not, if it is too quickly “swiped”he removes it, resumes his editing, and posts an alternative version.
Camille Ducellier, she tries to “do not clip, do not over-dynamise”. Resisting the ambient frenzy remains a challenge. The young director Dylan Suillaud (passed by class alpha of the INA) thus oscillates between the desire to continue to explore the formal possibilities offered by the vertical and the desire to free oneself from the constraints of TikTok and its algorithm, to put his camera back horizontally. He then begins to dream of cinema. In general, it is these moments that his friends or his half-brother choose to tell him that his creations may be great, they will never go to see a movie in theaters.