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Filed under: Editing •Motion Graphics •Post Production •

Open Wide: Creating That Widescreen Look

Xerox On Demand

Another long-time corporate client we enjoy working with is Xerox, for whom we create a lot of trade show graphics. In this case, the client knew from the outset that they wanted a widescreen look; they even considered running two 4:3 monitors with different video feeds side-by-side. Logistics ruled this out, but we decided to keep the widescreen idea.

A habit of many companies, when they have a revolutionary new product (in this case, an extremely high-speed full color copier), is to want to trace their own history in the context of the evolution of all of mankind - in somewhere between two minutes and thirty seconds. Xerox pre-selected the music (Right Here Right Now by Jesus Jones), which gave us a structure to hang off of. We noticed three distinct sections in the music, and decided to split our video into three different eras in time: pre-xerography (represented by a typing pool), during the development of the photocopier up to before color photocopying, and from then up to the present.

We decided the third section (the present) should be represented by a modern video look. For this we used a widescreen letterbox with black bars above and below, and filled this box with a television monitor shot close up to show the screen’s mask grid (also from Edit FX 2). Our hero shots were composited over this.

Since the singer in Jesus Jones does not exactly enunciate clearly (and trade show floors can be loud anyway), the client wanted us to overlay key words from the lyrics. Since we didn’t want to obscure the footage too much, and we already had these large black areas along the top and bottom of the screen, we decided to use the areas outside the box for the words, occasionally overlapping them into the video’s widescreen area to tie things together.

Wide Open Future

Widescreen is refreshing to design in, and also to watch because of its current novelty. It also is our inevitable future. By breaking the rules a bit and blurring the lines between 4:3 and widescreen, we’re getting to work with it more today, and are having fun creating some new looks to boot.

sidebar: Stretch Marks

This article illustrates several techniques for going between the normal 4:3 and widescreen worlds. One technique we do not suggest is the “just stretch it” approach: namely, stretching 4:3 source material to fill a widescreen image. We see this in particular at trade shows that have rented eyecatching widescreen plasma displays, and then realize later all of their videos were created for a 4:3 screen. So they stretch it to fit. And it looks wretched.

Likewise, you may be tempted to go shoot your next production in widescreen because your new camera allows you to, only to realize later that you have to blend in previously-shot 4:3 source material. And although many NLEs now allow you to choose between 16:9 and 4:3 image aspect ratios, they most likely do nothing to help you combine the two. This puts the burden back on you to figure out a way to combine them.

Pick which format you’re going to deliver in, and then decide how to treat the footage that doesn’t match. If you don’t have time to re-render these segments in a new format, consider using the system’s DVE to zoom the 4:3 footage up to full width (cropping the top and bottom), or zooming 16:9 footage down to a letterbox.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

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