Maezawa from the President’s Office here.
It’s Me, you’ve got a sharp eye.
These days, we’re living in the smartphone era, and more people view official and members-only pages on their phones. I don’t remember the exact ratio, but I believe it’s over 70%.
So we switched to vertical videos because they fill the smartphone screen and appear larger.
Our still photos are also shot vertically—photos of women are basically always taken in portrait orientation.
We also felt that, just like with still images, vertical video works better for photographing women, so that’s another reason we made the switch.
If we receive a lot of negative feedback, we may switch back, but I don’t think the branches have been hearing many complaints.
Oh, and we shoot the videos with a full-frame DSLR. Since they’re full-frame videos, they can hold their own against RED cameras (lol).
(We don’t use Log, so we lose out there, but since we don’t edit the footage, I don’t feel we’re at much of a disadvantage even without it.)
It’s me.
I think it’s in portrait orientation because it was filmed on a female member’s personal smartphone.
These days, video content is increasingly filmed and watched on smartphones.
TikTok and17LIVE are also almost always in portrait orientation by default, so I think it’s probably part of that trend.
Apparently, around 70% of video news is watched on smartphones too, so I expect portrait-oriented video content to keep increasing. Though yes, it’s definitely harder to watch on a PC.
Sorry if any of that is inaccurate!
