why is this "too wide?"

[TomTheDP]

Music videos have the most creative liberty. You can do a lot of funky stuff and it just doesn't matter a lot. 

[kye]

On 8/11/2023 at 9:30 AM, TomTheDP said:

Music videos have the most creative liberty. You can do a lot of funky stuff and it just doesn't matter a lot. 

Absolutely.

In this particular case with this video, I think the aesthetic choice was creatively relevant.  The idea of the song is that Taylor got swept up in someone else and lost touch with herself.  In the start she says "It's not really anything he said, or anything he did, it was the feeling that came along with it, and crazy thing is I don't know if I'm ever going to feel that way again, but I don't know if I should....  I knew his world moved too fast, burned too bright".  Then at the end she says "I don't know if you know who you are until you lose who you are".

For the video, creating the sense of her living in a dream seems appropriate, and the dream being great, and then terrible when it ended, I think the creative choices were all aligned:

• Soft rendering lens, not sharp
• Shallow DoF more often than not
• Very wide anamorphic
• Extreme colour grades, changing from shot to shot

The opposite would be to create a sharp, deep DoF, normal aspect ratio, lifelike looking image that would completely miss the entire point of the song.

The width is part of that "his world moved too fast, burned too bright" world.  It's dreamy to the point of almost being surreal.

I think this is where "camera people" fall short - they make cinematography decisions / assessments in a vacuum without considering the creative intent of the video.  The thing I realised about cinematography and colour grading is that they're subtle arts, and work through symbolism and nuance, and are the sum of many tiny decisions.  This kind of thing isn't obvious to the technician, only to the more experienced creative.  With todays' camera culture of sharper this, and lower-distortion that, and accuracy above all, it's no wonder that the layman throws out the baby with the bathwater.