From the Top: From the Foundation to the Evolution of our Industry—Let's Build SMPTE's Future Together

When SMPE was founded in 1916 by Charles Francis Jenkins, he had been concerned with the standardization of film while simultaneously working on early television. His film work includes technical specifications for frame rate, gauge, perforations, and, of course, aspect ratio. What would C. F. Jenkins have made of 9:16 aspect ratio and watching stories chopped into 90-second fragments on a TV you kept in your pocket? As aspect ratios widened over the decades, differentiating the theatrical experience from the home viewing, it would have seemed unthinkable to suggest that a tall, narrow aspect ratio would one day become the most frequently viewed format. Vertical videos, a staple of platforms like TikTok, have become an increasingly important part of the media business, with services such as Crazy Maple Studio's Reelshort already starting to prove the subscription market for vertical dramas. The success of verticals is not just a function of form and format. At the Cannes Film Festival this year, much of the conversation centered on the economics of traditional filmmaking and how the models can and must change. Verticals are typically one and a half to three minutes long, consisting of 60 to 90 episodes with a cliffhanger at the end of each. Their runtimes are comparable to a typical episodic show, with budgets in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. This high turnover content is also creating new opportunities for actors, production, and post-production teams to take advantage of technologies such as virtual production, cloud production, and AI, thereby reducing shoot costs and complexity.

Print ISSN

1545-0279

Electronic ISSN

2160-2492

Published

2025-07

Content type

Opinion

DOI

10.5594/JMI.2025/GUTT4844