sport of sacred spherical cowsApr 14

Huh.

A #MediaHistory question.

Trying to find scholarship discussing the practice of 1970s/1980s television broadcasters compressing film on the horizontal (for instance, kung-fu genre movies) rather than cropping or letterboxing.

Grew up watching impossibly lanky live-action martial artists on screen, and have a sense that this has impacted the aesthetics of media inheriting from that experience of the genre in latter decades.

Yet am only turning up discussions of the much later transition of television production to widescreen formats. My interest is in how those who grew up with already wide-screen film being squeezed to fit then contemporary television screens... have perhaps reflected that technologically-mediated way of seeing in art thereafter.

Boosts appreciated.

Show threadcwicseolfor

@beadsland A friend once was playing a 2010s-era Final Fantasy game and I’m usually rubbed markedly the wrong way by that art style, but I found it more attractive than usual, more compelling. Worth noting we were both artists and fans of figure drawing.

After several minutes of staring I figured out the TV was actually slightly horizontally compressing the output, intended for TV dimensions, on a slightly wider screen than standard to fill the screen. It didn’t make them look altogether human in proportion, but a lot less weird.

I think you’re onto something significant.

Apr 15 at 6:08amWeb