Clients rarely ask for a festival film. They ask for something for the feed, then someone sees the rushes and says, wait, this could be more. The answer is to plan for both from the start.

Shoot the long version first

We build the shot list around the longer cut and mine the short edits out of it. A ten-minute story has natural beats; a ninety-second spot is those beats compressed. Going the other way, stretching a short ad into a film, always shows the seams.

Coverage is cheap on the day and expensive afterwards. Ask for the extra angle, the extra take, the thirty seconds of silence at the end.

Edit for the screen it will live on

The vertical cut is not a crop. We recompose, retime and often re-sequence it, because a phone held at arm’s length wants a different hierarchy than a cinema. Sound design changes too: the feed version has to work on mute.

Treat each format as its own film that happens to share a shoot, and each one gets better.