Plan vertical video

What this is about

Two people side by side stop fitting, a landscape becomes a strip, and the eye is pushed up and down instead of left and right. Vertical sits closer to a portrait than to a wide shot, and it rewards faces, hands and objects held towards the lens. Treated as a crop from 16:9 it does the opposite: resolution disappears, heads get clipped, and the subject ends up wherever the wide composition happened to leave it. That is why the decision belongs in prep — it changes lens choice, blocking and the shape of every background you scout.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Vertical prefers depth over width: things arranged behind each other read better than things placed side by side.
• Two people in one frame usually means stacking them, staggering them in depth, or moving to singles instead.
• Interface and captions occupy top and bottom, shrinking the usable picture more than the aspect ratio alone suggests.
• Shooting wide and cropping later costs resolution and control; shooting 9:16 natively costs planning time instead.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Decide before the shoot which ratio is the master. Lens, distance, background and blocking all follow from that single choice, and reversing it later is expensive.
2. Reblock the scenes for height: what stood side by side in a wide frame gets stacked, staggered in depth, or split into separate shots.
3. Pick backgrounds with vertical structure — a doorway, a corridor, a shelf, a facade. Wide horizontal backdrops collapse into an anonymous strip.
4. Go closer, or wider on the lens, than the 16:9 instinct suggests, and judge headroom on a monitor rotated into the actual delivery shape.
5. Tape the safe area onto the monitor so the operator can see during the take where interface and captions are going to land.
6. Keep action inside the middle band. Movement across the frame leaves a vertical picture almost immediately and reads as an error rather than a style.
7. Shoot the second ratio deliberately when you need both: either its own pass, or a shared capture area agreed with post and marked with guides.
8. Review a take on a phone before you move on. A composition that works on a large monitor can be unreadable at the size people actually watch.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Filming everything wide with a promise that the edit will crop it later, which delivers clipped heads and soft pictures.
• Composing for the whole 9:16 rectangle and then losing the lower third to captions and buttons.
• Relying on wide establishing shots that carry no information at all once the sides are gone.

With TillyGen

Set the target format in TillyGen and the shot list comes back framed for it: vertical setups, safe-area notes, and the extra passes a second ratio would cost.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.