hearthesilence wrote:Bear in mind that the first few seasons were composed for widescreen as well as academy to future proof those episodes. It was a pain, which is why they ditched composing for widescreen when the option was offered to them. Wait until you get to season four and five. (Maybe even three - forgot when they switched gears exactly.)
It was season 3 when they stopped
protecting for possible widescreen presentation, not
composing for widescreen, which they never did (the best summary I've seen of how much it meant that they embraced the 4:3 ratio is
here):
Because we knew the show would be broadcast in 4:3, Bob chose to maximize the storytelling within that construct. As full wide shots in 4:3 rendered protagonists smaller, they couldn’t be sustained for quite as long as in a feature film, but neither did we go running too quickly to close-ups as a consequence. Instead, mid-shots became an essential weapon for Bob, and on those rare occasions when he was obliged to leave the set, he would remind me to ensure that the director covered scenes with mid-sized shots that allowed us to effectively keep the story in the wider world, and to resist playing too much of the story in close shots.
Similarly, Bob further embraced the 4:3 limitation by favoring gentle camera movements and a combination of track shots and hand-held work, implying a documentarian construct. If we weren’t going to be panoramic and omniscient in 4:3, then we were going to approach scenes with a camera that was intelligent and observant, but intimate. Crane shots didn’t often help, and anticipating a movement or a line of dialogue often revealed the filmmaking artifice. Better to have the camera react and acquire, coming late on a line now and then. Better to have the camera in the flow of a housing-project courtyard or squad room, calling less attention to itself as it nonetheless acquired the tale.
Well before this happened, Simon himself
offered some confusing comments that seemed to reinforce the association of HD with widescreen ("No blu-ray. It was not shot in high-def or letter box. No point.") This is interesting reading, because when attempting to clarify he suggests that the "documentarian feel" was crucial.
The
DVD Active review also conflated aspect ratio with resolution when trying to deny that the widescreen conversion of the series was controversial. Regardless of whether one approves or not, it seems simply accurate to say that this kind of thing is controversial, but the DVD Active review instead just claims that the show was filmed in the "more cramped" (sic) ratio because the industry change from 4:3 to 16:9 was ongoing and they stuck with 4:3, which "saved both time and money" (a claim that doesn't seem to make any sense, and those were not the actual reasons according to David Simon).
The reviewer adds, "I’ve heard some people reason that The Wire was ‘supposed’ to be presented in 4:3/SD because it was meant to evoke the lower resolution image of a surveillance camera. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no evidence to support this theory."
The "surveillance camera" thing is a red herring because in readily available statements such as the above, David Simon has explained that the aspect ratio was a conscious choice and that it felt "more like real life and real television and not like a movie” and that the whole thing was done on a shoestring with expectations far more modest than something like
The Sopranos.
Yet when it's remastered in a way that makes it seem far more "cinematic," many will go for that, even if it goes against the basic original concept of the series and composition of the shots, but I'm probably mainly preaching to the converted here (if anyone read this far down!). The part of the DVD Active review that was funniest/most bizarre to me, though was this:
Some viewers have reported crewmembers and equipment drifting into the edges of the shot. I didn’t notice any during my quick run-through, but it was a comparatively small sampling. It’s easy to believe that mistakes were made.