Nick Night Lady Gaga Tall Video
I’ve been a proponent of vertical/tall video since the very first shoot I did with the Canon 5D MkII. As a visual artist, I don’t think we need to be constrained by the TV frame or movie theater formats for video. Holding on to presentation ideals based on outmoded distribution channels is not what I call moving forward with multimedia. That’s why I’m glad to see inspirational cutting edge shooters like Nick Night posting vertical video segments like this one of Lady Gaga for ID Magazine.
Lady Gaga – SHOWstudio – 200 Portraits from SHOWstudio on Vimeo.
This video is from a series called 200 Portraits Nick shot for ID Magazine:
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of i-D magazine, Nick Knight mirrored his 1985 ’100 Portraits’ series and photographed 200 of the most important people in fashion, music and culture today. Alongside the photographic portraits, Knight created a series of unique video portraits of each sitter during this landmark seventeen-day shoot. Each week, SHOWstudio.com will launch a new selection of video portraits captured on a specific date, the series as a whole documenting not only this shoot but a slice of twenty-first century culture.
If you haven’t been keeping up with Nick’s SHOWstudio.com site, you should be. He is pushing the envelope between fashion and filmmaking and doing it really well. I have previously written about him on PCN and commented that I hoped to see vertical video from him:
I would have liked to seen this video shot in a tall format (vertically) without having to work around all the white space you have to deal with when showcasing a single person on camera. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the way Nick Knight used the negative space for the shots that were obviously inspired by the horizontal video framing. I just think that with all the options on the web, I would like to see more vertical video players as primary content instead of just as sidebar/skyscraper advertisements.
It’s a good thing he reads this blog, yeah right. I actually think vertical video is a natural progression for visual artists since most printed material is presented vertically. With motion advertising heating up there’s going to be a lot of HDSLR shooters making a name for themselves in this market whether it’s with traditionally formatted motion work or with vertical images inspired by print. For further reading, check out the article I wrote about motion magazine concepts.
