I’m mixing things up a bit with this blog, if you’re not sure how you arrived here, you can see examples of my Next Day Film Wedding Videos here. It’s gonna get a little bit technical but i’m also going to keep it simple, brief, and include lots of visual examples.

The Problem: How to repurpose a wedding film for the vertical format of modern social media?

When you binge your favourite new series, odds are you’re seeing one of two aspect ratios. On your television at home these will either fill the entire screen, or you’ll see black bars at the top and bottom of your screen. This is called Letterboxing, a process that ensures you see the whole series as it was designed.

When I’m crafting a wedding film, I’m doing all the filming and editing with this in mind. The best way to watch one of my films is on a big and bright 4K Television.

However, I want to share my work, and my clients want to share their weddings with friends and family. Social Media is (almost) perfect for this. The issue is that platforms like Instagram and TikTok prefer vertical formatted media.

Here’s a moment from Anna and Hayden’s Next Day Film.

To share this moment on Instagram we can either letterbox or crop

Neither of these options are good either the image is tiny and the screen is dominated by empty black space, or the image is severely cropped and half the bridal party are gone.

The Solution: Film a much taller image but frame for a narrower centre crop.

This is what we call ‘Open Gate’ shooting, where a larger image is recorded and a centre crop is used to deliver a standard aspect ratio. This term is actually decades old and refers to a golden age of Hollywood filmmaking. It’s recently been having a resurgence with videographers and content creators thanks to a couple of cameras that offer non standard aspect ratio video recording and a rising need to repurpose material for social media.

This is another moment from Anna and Hayden’s Next Day Film. What you’re seeing above is as I shot it on the day, the framing here is exactly what I intended. (looks pretty good eh?)

however the camera actually saw and recorded more than this framing, so when it came time to use this moment in a video that we could all share on Instagram here’s what I could use

Notice how we can see Anna and Hayden’s feet in this second version of the shot? notice all the extra space above their heads? this is the extra image provided by shooting ‘Open Gate’.

It’s not a perfect solution, some of the bridal party is still cropped out. but without shooting open gate I likely wouldn’t have been able to include Anna and Hayden in full.

Critically the shot doesn't feel cropped. the composition has space to breathe, It isn’t as perfectly composed as the original but it still looks good and it let’s us share the moment cleanly.

The Bonus: Stills extracted from Open Gate footage look great.

First a quick point of clarification. this is not photography, that is a seperate service I offer, when I refer to stills I’m talking about still shots extracted from video

Shooting open gate has one other huge benefit. When extracting stills from this video, which I do for couples whenever I’m providing Video and Photography. these stills conform better to the standards of regular photography.

In my opinion video lives for the close-up shot, bringing us closer to people, faces and eyes, where all the emotion can be seen and felt. whereas photography tends to benefit from being framed a little wider. allowing the whole scene to show more context and detail.

And, because these moments have been captured in motion, I can choose multiple frames from a clip to extract as a still. It’s like photographing the wedding a second time with no time pressure or stress. I can choose exactly the moment or moments where everything looks best

Remember this moment from above…

Here’s everything the camera captured presented as a still