The director is a woman in her mid-forties who has been working in commercial video, primarily for UK brands, for about twenty years. Her work runs on YouTube, on CTV, on cinema pre-roll, and occasionally on broadcast. She has, since Q3 of 2022, declined every commission that would have required her to shoot in vertical format for TikTok, Reels, or YouTube Shorts. The commissions in question have been substantial — some of them very substantial — and she has, on our count, walked away from something like £700-900,000 of work over the intervening period. She asked to be identified only as Marilena for the piece.
The decision
Marlow Osoye: When did you make the decision, and why?
Marilena: Q3 of 2022. I had, at that point, been commissioned by three consecutive clients to produce vertical-format short-video work over the previous eighteen months. On each commission, I had done what a working commercial director does — I had accepted the format, worked with it, tried to produce something I was proud of within its constraints. On each commission, I had come away from the delivery with a piece of work I was, on honest reflection, not particularly proud of.
The specific problem was not that vertical is a technically demanding format. It is not; the framing is trivial once you accept it. The specific problem is that the format, combined with the platform environment it lives in, structurally forces a specific set of craft compromises that produce work I do not want my name on.
The compromises are, roughly: a very short opening in which any editorial complexity has to be abandoned; a compressed narrative arc that has to fit into 15 to 60 seconds; a visual style that has to compete for attention against every other piece of vertical content that will play adjacent to it in the feed; an assumption that the audience is watching without sound in a substantial share of cases; and — this is the one that finally decided me — a lack of any control over the piece's context of reception, because it plays in a feed with every other piece of vertical content the viewer has been served.
Individually, each of these is a legitimate craft constraint that a good director could work with. Collectively, they produce a piece of work that has, on my own honest assessment, very little to distinguish it from every other piece of vertical work being produced by any other competent director. I found that, over three commissions, I was producing pieces I could not really see as mine — pieces that could have been made by anyone with the same brief. The specific creative voice I have spent twenty years developing was being erased by the format. I did not want to keep doing that.
What she does instead
Marlow: What has been the professional consequence?
Marilena: Financially, meaningful. I have turned down commissions that would have been substantial contributions to my annual income. On the other hand, the commissions I have taken have been, on average, pieces I am much more proud of than the vertical work I turned down would have been. My reputation, as it has developed since 2022, is specifically as a director who produces long-form work in traditional aspect ratios for platforms and contexts where craft still matters. That reputation has generated its own commissions — not enough to fully replace the vertical income, but enough that I am, on my current schedule, doing work I want to do most of the time.
The specific new commissions I have been offered since making the decision are, on average, longer, more editorially substantial, and more directly connected to the craft traditions I care about. Some of them are broadcast commercials of a fairly traditional kind. Some are long-form YouTube documentary pieces, of the kind we discussed in another piece in this issue. A small number are pre-roll cinema commercials, which are, in my honest view, the format I most enjoy working in and the format the industry currently under-commissions.
Marlow: Would you say the trade-off has been worth it?
Marilena: For me, yes. My career is at a stage where I can afford to make specific craft-driven decisions that a younger director could not. I have been established long enough to have relationships that produce commissions on their own terms, rather than depending on whatever commissions are currently fashionable. If I were fifteen years earlier in my career, I could not have made the same decision. I would have had to do the vertical work whether I wanted to or not.
"The specific problem with vertical video is not the format. The format is fine. The specific problem is that the platform-plus-format combination has, over five years, produced a very narrow set of acceptable creative choices that most directors, most of the time, do not have the space to work outside. Working inside those choices is not, on my personal read, work I am willing to build a portfolio around."
What she'd tell a younger director
Marlow: Last question. If a younger director asked whether they should follow your example, what would you tell them?
Marilena: I would tell them not to follow my example. Or, more precisely, not to follow my example yet. A young director's job is to build a career and, in the specific market conditions of 2026, that career includes learning to work in the formats the industry is currently commissioning. Turning down vertical work at the start of a career, in the way I have turned it down mid-career, would cost that director access to commissions and contacts they cannot afford to lose. They would, on my honest read, sabotage themselves.
What I would tell them instead is to work in vertical, but to do so with clear eyes about what the format is asking them to produce. Do not treat the vertical work as your primary creative statement. Treat it as the paid work that funds the specific projects — the short film, the personal documentary, the passion piece — that you actually want your work to be associated with in the long term. Take the money. Do the work. Do it as well as the format will permit. Keep your creative energy for the projects that will define your career.
The specific director I most admire from the previous generation used to say that a commercial director's job was to shoot beautiful things for stupid clients and then use the money to shoot beautiful things for smart ones. The formulation is a bit unkind. The underlying observation is exactly right, and it applies to vertical work as it applied to the equivalent formats of thirty years ago. Work in the formats the industry currently pays for. Save yourself for the work you actually care about. Do not — as I did, for three commissions — try to make the paid work into the work you care about. That path produces neither the paid work you were hired for nor the work you want your career to reflect.
My decision to stop shooting vertical was, in retrospect, a mid-career decision I could afford to make. A younger director, on the current industry structure, cannot. The industry structure may change; the specific formats may age out; the current insistence on vertical may itself pass. When those things happen, the space for craft-driven decisions will widen. Until then, most directors will have to do vertical work whether they want to or not, and my advice is to do it as well as one can while keeping some creative energy for the work one actually wants to be known for.