Short Film Competition: Win €6000 with Nespresso

Think vertically with Nespresso Talents 2016 and your film could be showcased in a private screening during the Cannes Film Festival

Cinema doesn’t sit still. In its short 120 year history, audiences have witnessed the moving image take on myriad guises. In the art form’s early years, flickering black and white images played out to the whirl of the projector. Later, sound was added and colour became de rigueur. Now, in today’s high-tech multiplexes, images jump out at us in stereoscopic 3D and are projected onto football pitch-sized IMAX screens.

But it’s not just the form the films take that have changed over time. The shape of the frame has also been evolving. Early cinema adopted a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio and stuck with it all the way through Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 30s and 40s. But as the square frame of television sets began to eat away at cinema’s audience, filmmakers and distributors reacted in the 50s by going wider, experimenting with film stocks and projection techniques in an attempt to push our peripheral vision to the max. From sword and sandal epics to dusty westerns, films were now presented in newfangled widescreen film formats like Cinerama, CinemaScope and VistaVision.

Filmmakers have continued to tinker with aspect ratio from the 50s onwards – for example, 4:3 framing has had a mini-resurgence of late thanks to directors like Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff) and Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights), while Xavier Dolan used the unconventional 1:1 ratio for his blistering melodrama Mommy. However, widescreen has been the prevailing aesthetic for cinema of the last six decades and the standard on our HD TVs, desktop computers and laptops.

Could another watershed moment be on the horizon? One that might end the dominance of horizontal framing as the orientation of choice for filmmakers?

Nespresso certainly think so, and that’s why they’re launching the Nespresso Talents 2016 contest, the selected filmmakers of which will have their films showcased at Cannes, the world’s glitziest film festival, and also pick up a cool €6000.

What makes this short film competition different from others is that Nespresso are asking filmmakers to think vertically – meaning create a film shot in the vertical 9:16 format.

It’s an opportunity to rethink cinema, for filmmakers to retune their eyes to a new perspective. But, as Nespresso rightly points out, we’ve already begun to think and see in this whole new dimension thanks to the prevalence of mobile phones in our lives. “When watching video, people don’t rotate the screen to view it in the correct aspect ratio, they keep it vertical.” As a result, vertical viewing has increased 600% over the last five years.

Not so long ago, shooting video on your phone while holding it upright made you look like an amateur. Why shoot this way when the video will end up being a narrow sliver hemmed in by blocks of black on either side when it’s uploaded to Facebook or YouTube? But this desktop-driven, cinema-focused thinking seems more atavistic by the day. More than likely we’ll watch those videos on our mobiles, and recent research has shown that we hold our phones vertically 94% of the time.

Snapchat, and other apps like Meerkat and Periscope, have also helped accustom us to the portrait aesthetic and allowed us to get creative with vertical video. And we’re responding to this new dimension, with recent research by Snapchat showing that content created in the vertical format is nine times more likely to be watched all the way through than conventional horizontal videos.

Framing your film vertically might seem restrictive initially, but you’d be surprised what looking at the world from a different angle can achieve. “Once freed from the shackles of convention it can be surprisingly liberating,” says Nespresso. “Vertical enables audiences and filmmakers alike to see things from a different perspective, and develop new ways of telling stories that haven't been done before.”

Nespresso is asking emerging filmmakers to get creative with their day-to-day environment – to Explore your extraordinary.  “We believe that your everyday moments can be transformed into something extraordinary. These indefinable, incomparable and meaningful moments that add that little something, that uplift your everyday.”

What will these new vertical films look like? For Nespresso, that’s what’s so exciting about the project. “This is why we love the idea of vertical. It has the potential to change the landscape of film in new and exciting ways that no one can predict.”

The deadline for entering your film is 10 April, after which an international jury will judge the work and the three selected filmmakers will be announced and invited to Cannes Film Festival. You can submit your work here.

To find out more about entering the contest, go to nespresso.com/talents.

• Sponsored content