From Horizontal Screen to Vertical Screen: Visual Logic Reconstruction and Aesthetic Adaptation in Micro-Dramas

Abstract

The deep integration of mobile internet and the proliferation of handheld terminals have made the vertical screen format the dominant mode of presentation for micro-dramas, posing a fundamental challenge to the film and television language system rooted in horizontal screen aesthetics. The vertical screen is not a simple cropping of the horizontal screen; rather, it reconstructs visual grammar with the vertical frame as its logical starting point. This study examines this paradigm shift from the perspectives of visual logic reconstruction and aesthetic adaptation. The vertical screen employs central composition to shift the visual unit from spatial setting to human figure, with shot scales gravitating toward medium and close-up shots, thereby enhancing the intensity of visual focus. Spatial compression curbs the perception of depth, fostering a tendency toward flatness; visual information assumes a vertical hierarchy, and the trajectory of attention capture shifts to a top-down flow. The vertical frame achieves a dynamic balance between rapid transitions and the Gestalt of vertical movement, with editing reconstructing coherence along the vertical axis as the new baseline. Ultimately, the visual grammar of the vertical screen shapes an aesthetic form of immediacy, in which the visual intensity of the present moment becomes the core criterion of aesthetic judgment-revealing the mechanism through which media properties profoundly reshape visual language.