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Filed under: Editing •Motion Graphics •Post Production •

Open Wide: Creating That Widescreen Look

Black Bars and White Lies

So far, we’ve been working under the assumption that the source material was actually shot as widescreen. However, we know how clients are; some of them are going to come to you after the entire show’s been shot using a normal 4:3 aspect ratio, and ask you to “just make it widescreen” after the fact.

The simplest approach is to merely overlay black bars along the bottom and top of the image to give it a letterboxed look. As hinted elsewhere, this is what in essence happens when film is projected in a movie theater: the top and bottom portions of the 4:3 film frame are masked off. The difference is, their source material was shot with this in mind. Go through your footage and see if you can get away with this cropping. If necessary, move the source up or down in the frame (by an even number of lines, to maintain interlaced field order and sharpness) to make sure important parts of the image don’t get cropped off.

One area of slack is that, as above, you don’t have to stick to a religious 16:9 letterbox: Play around with smaller bars that still give a widescreen impression but don’t chop off as much of the image. Supplement this by designing your opening title, chapter heads, and other support graphics with the widescreen aspect in mind, and you should be able to pull this cheat off convincingly enough.

Of course, you can always turn a “cheat” into an “artistic decision.” Now that we’ve personally had a taste of widescreen, we find ourselves wanting to design to that format more and more. But again, many jobs call for 4:3 aspect delivery. Beyond imposing a fake widescreen on our sources, we’ve started playing around with this layout in a more creative fashion: we restrict the main image to a letterboxed widescreen center, but go ahead and use the rest of the frame for additional graphics. Here’s a couple of examples.

Isuzu Axiom

One of our regular clients was Kogei America, then the marketing arm of American Isuzu Motors. A common task of theirs is creating videos about new Isuzu vehicles, aimed at the press and Isuzu sales staff. A recent project for Kogei included opening and closing titles plus additional graphics for a video about their new Axiom crossover vehicle. The Axiom, descended almost directly from one of their concept vehicles, incorporates Isuzu’s most cutting-edge technology, and we wanted to carry this high-tech theme over to the graphical look. We decided part of this would include using widescreen framing where possible. Fortunately, most cars in profile or from above also have a widescreen aspect ratio, making our jobs easier.

For jobs like these, we normally create a loopable full-screen background texture (some refer to this as “wallpaper”), and composite any technical illustrations on top of this. For the Axiom video, we still used a full-screen background so the transitions between full-screen video and our inserts would not be too jarring, but otherwise restricted the layout to a 16:9 widescreen box. The backing plate for this box was a simple black solid with a graph-paper-like overlay (carrying over a theme from some of their print materials for the Axiom), run at 50% opacity to subdue the background where the action was taking place to make it easier for the viewer to focus. The technical illustrations then went on top of this graph paper background.

We carried this “widescreen inside of 4:3” theme wherever else it made sense. For example, we had a close-up of the car recede back from full frame until it filled just a 16:9 letterbox over our background. In other shots where we had to create montages of concept vehicles or competing cars, we irregularly masked the cars down to suggest individual widescreen aspect ratios (as shown here to the left).

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