The Shape of New Media: Screen Space, Aspect Ratios, and Digitextuality

If everything is manufactured [in digital texts], then everything must be considered.

—Katherine Sarafian, Pixar Animation Studios (222)

This article examines how widescreen, analog filmmaking strategies such as letterboxing have become commonplace in digital texts such as online advertising, Web-based film series, and even digital animation films from Pixar. The various delivery platforms associated with new media texts must address the spatial and aesthetic challenges presented by the various aspect ratios necessary to accommodate many monitor/screen shapes and sizes. The online and digital texts analyzed in this article use cinematic techniques (such as letterboxing) in an effort to reproduce film/video poetics and thus present their products in terms of highbrow consumption strategies. Further, many video games, regardless of whether they are of first-person shooter or sport genres, deploy cut-scenes or “cinematics.”¹ These techniques ape cinematic tropes in order to blend (or mask altogether) the transition between transtextual choices such as video games based on films or televised sports (e.g., The Godfather or the Madden football franchise, respectively). Because online content faces many challenges—different operating systems, monitor sizes, screen resolutions, and monitor widths, not to mention download speeds—it seems that content producers want to achieve MIVI (Maximum Instantaneous Visual Impact) (Garfield 77), and the panache of letterboxing is useful to colonize monitor space. By colonization, I assert that the shift in aspect ratio and its demarcating effect within screen space requires some visual shift on the part of the viewer.² Colonization occurs when Academy ratio proportions are transformed without input from the viewer into a letterboxed or widescreen visual field.

Pixar Animation Studios provides an intriguing and unique example of how aspect ratios must be negotiated when shifting between analog and digital formats. Pixar recomposes each film it produces for home video outlets. Although most films shot in the CinemaScope aspect ratio (2.35:1) must undergo significant aesthetic metamorphoses and are often released into home video formats as “full screen” via pan-and-scan, Pixar’s texts are digital blanks. The mise-en-scène³ of a Pixar film exists only in digital form. There is no soundstage or cinematographer to consult with regard to framing aesthetics. Digital mattes are composed in both formats from the first storyboard with the home-video release in mind. Pixar’s dualformat digital production strategy is the digitextual solution to a problem faced by early experimental uses of widescreen in such films as The Big Trail (1930) and The Bat Whispers (1930).⁴ The Big Trail and The Bat Whispers were shot in both wide and Academy ratios simultaneously. This process of concurrent production with multiple formats had recently been deemed necessary with the advent of sound filmmaking where multiple versions of films were produced in various languages to facilitate distribution to overseas ancillary markets. The Big Trail was filmed in two cinematographic formats, but it was also shot (with different casts) in at least four other languages to compensate for the European markets on which Hollywood relied so heavily in the silent era (Crafton 428–29).

In an American Cinematographer article from 1930, Arthur Edeson comments on the formal differences between the wide (70mm) version (which Edeson shot) and Lucien Androit’s Academy ratio version of The Big Trail. Edeson states,

In working on such a picture as The Big Trail, 70 millimeter is a tremendously important aid for the epic sweep of the picture demands that it be painted against a great canvas. Grandeur gives us such a canvas to work with, and enables us to make the background play its part in the picture. . . . The background thus plays a vitally important role in the picture—a role which can only be brought out completely by being shown as 70 millimeter film can show it. Lucien Androit . . . did a superb piece of work, but the medium with which he was working could not begin to capture the vast sweep of the story and its background as did the Grandeur. Working in 35mm film, he was simply unable to dramatize the backgrounds as did the...