"Make Video Horizontal Again" Hat

It’s July 2018.

The sun rises on a warm, summer day.

You’ve got a shoot today (and it’s a big one).

This is gonna be one for the reel.

You throw on your lucky underwear, load up your gear, and drive over to the shoot location.

The entire day could be described as a “movie.”

You are in the zone. Flow, as Sam Kolder likes to call it.

Directing, filming, slugging energy drinks. You even tried that 360 gimbal roll you saw on Tik Tok.

And you nailed it.

As the sun sets on a magical shoot day you exclaim “That’s a wrap!”

“Spielberg shit” you whisper to yourself.

Everyone is happy.

As you are loading out, dragging the final Pelican out to your car, the client comes over to you for a chat.

She thanks you for your expertise today.

“One last thing” she says.

“We’d love it if we could edit all the footage from today into vertical 9x16 videos.”

“Oh no…” you think to yourself.

“I know we had originally said horizontal but we are really trying to make a push on this new platform called Tik Tok and the marketing director is on my ass about going vertical.”

Your heart sinks.

But you force a smile, “No problem! That’s the way the world is going, isn’t it?”

The drive home is a dark one.

The sun is down.

You decide not to play any music in the car, it wouldn’t sound good anyway.

You get home and approach your editing station.

Your “grind station” as you like to call it.

You slide the crisp plastic of the SD card into the awaiting dongle.

Files start flying.

It’s electric.

It's time to create a sequence.

Your mouse hovers over the horizontal 16x9 option.

Time freezes. *gulp*

1 second passes, then 5.

Your heart starts to break as you move your cursor down the options list to Satan’s aspect ratio, 9x16.

*click*

With your new awkwardly tall sequence setup, you begin hacking together an edit.

It’s not pretty.

Triple-stacked frames. 250% zooms. 90-degree rotations.

Anything you can do to fill out this horrible sequence.

You work through the night.

As the summer sun rises, you export.

Finally.

You send it over to the client.

They respond instantly.

They LOVE it. They love how vertical it is.

You hate yourself. And you hate vertical video.

You walk through the vertical door frame to your room and collapse onto your vertical bed.

You drift off into a slumber where you dream of horizontal video.

But alas, it is just a dream.

The end.  

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"Make Video Horizontal Again" is a merch brand I started this fall after seeing so many people in the filmmaking community expressing their distaste for vertical video.

I knew we needed a way to express our frustration while still looking cool.

Do I really think that video will go horizontal again? Who knows, probably not. Doesn't matter.

What I do know is that you will look fresh as hell rockin' one of these MVHA truckers.