(This is my twenty-third post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
I’m old enough to recall a time when TVs were 4:3 and movies made for big screens were cropped down to that aspect ratio to get them to “fit.”
This was done in two ways: If the person doing the conversion was overworked or lazy, they set a camera up to film the movie and let it run centered for the duration. Any action on the edges was lost, but oh, well.
If the person doing the conversion had the energy and time to do better they would pan their camera to follow the action as it went closer to the left or right of the composition. This required some editorial and aesthetic decisions on their part that might not made with consultation with the original makers of the film.
Later on we got “Letter-boxed” versions that were seen as better because nothing was cropped out, but in the days before HD video being a universal thing this still meant a lot of detail just wasn’t there any more.
I remember cassette tapes, which often had the same album art as records but cropped to be rectangles. Then CDs became more popular and we went back to squares for everything. We still have that legacy, it’s why album art for music today is always a square, even if it’s (almost) all downloads or streaming.
I remember programmers working hard to get their creations to be less than 1.44 MB (technically a little less than that) because if you went over and needed two floppy disks you doubled your distribution costs. The innovations they made because they had to were amazing.
This isn’t a “good old days” or “things are so much better” blog post, but it’s interesting to see how creativity flows to fill the shape of different containers. Sometimes it’s begrudgingly (cassette tapes), other times, like in the article linked above, it’s transformative.
My classroom is a container, regardless of if I want it to be or not. Try as I might, I still have students submit videos where the actual text on the title card is “Project 2” instead of “The Great Escape,” “Bob Finds A Thing,” or anything else that makes it be less “I did this for a grade” and more “I have created documentation of my own creativity.”
In the other extreme, sometimes I have to talk with a student about what “G Rated” means, and why we need to make videos conform to that for the district Film Festival.
(It’s not just because of the student code of conduct, it’s also because elementary students participate so they WILL see the videos. Blood and death are neat and cool to a 13 year old, but perhaps not a good idea to show a 6 year old.)
What I write here is shaped by the container I’m in as a teacher. The content I cover, the words I use, are all done with the understanding that a student, parent, or administrator who knows me will find this website.
It’s happened. Multiple times, in fact. I don’t tell anyone at school where this is and my name’s common enough that Googling me will find other, more famous people first (adding qualifying terms leads to sites maintained by my employer more than anything else) so it would be easy to slide into a false sense of security through obscurity, but then I remember I’ve been found before.
(You’ll notice I never use profanity. I’ll even warn the reader if a link goes someplace that does. This is why.)
Sometimes, when the container/media changes, the art changes with it.
I’ve only a few years remaining before I’m ready for retirement. I’ve thought a little about what that will look like, but I can’t predict how.
I’ll flow into that new container when I get to it, I guess.