Today we jumped into one of our favourite topics — the overuse of super a super-wide frame, i.e. cinemascope, in contemporary movies. The Hunger Games is our unfortunate case study today, but the conversation touches on everything from the ratio’s rise to multiplex dominance to whatever the heck Michael Bay is doing with aspect ratios in his Transformers movies. Seriously, what is going on there.

Filmmaker Paige Smith joins us to talk about the animated psychological horror film Perfect Blue and the copious use of self-reflexivity — when a work openly acknowledges itself, forcing the viewer to recognize the trappings and mechanics of the movie they’re watching.

Walter Murch’s revolutionary sound design technique worldizing aesthetically defines George Lucas’s 1973 film American Graffiti. Worldizing tries to emulate how a sound would be heard in the particular location of each scene. In this episode of Film Formally, Devan and Will discuss the technique and how Murch uses it to emphasize the narrative needs of American Graffiti.