From Horizontal Screen to Vertical Screen: Visual Logic Reconstruction and Aesthetic Adaptation in Micro-Dramas

Abstract

With the development of mobile Internet and the spread of handheld devices, the vertical screen format has become the main way to present micro-dramas, and thus a serious problem has arisen for the system of film and television language that originated from the aesthetics of the horizontal screen. The vertical screen is not a simple crop of the horizontal screen; rather, it reconstructs visual grammar according to the logic of the vertical frame. The two above will be taken into account in the construction of visual logic and aesthetic adaptation. The main subject of the vertical screen moves from a place to a person, and at the same time, gradually reduces the scale of the shot to medium shots and close-ups to increase the visual focus. Spatial compression reduces the sense of depth and makes things appear flat; the organisation of visual information is vertical, and the path for drawing attention is from top to bottom. The vertical frame is in motion; it is moving quickly and has a sense of verticality; editing can also create a sense of order by setting a new baseline. Finally, the visual grammar of vertical screen shapes an aesthetic form of immediacy; that is to say, the strength of the visual experience at a particular time is the main criterion for aesthetic judgment, and thus shows how media properties can profoundly alter visual language.