As a Buffy fan from the beginning, I have always loved the show's unique style, quirkiness and (most importantly in this case) cinematography. Seasons One and Two of Buffy were shot on 16mm, and while Season Three was shot in 35mm, there are no widescreen masters (though 16:9 extractions were done later on certain scenes for flashbacks in Season Four).
Starting with Season Four, as per an industry-wide move toward HDTV, the show's production company, Mutant Enemy, began to prepare widescreen versions of Buffy episodes (alongside the regular 4x3 versions) for foreign and later domestic widescreen broadcast. The typical technique for this is to center all of your shots within the 16x9 frame, and then extract your 4x3 image from the center. Now the big question that pops up here is, which format is intended, and which is being protected for? While shows like 24 are quite obviously intended for 16x9 presentation (just look at all those split-screens), Buffy is not and never has been. The one exception to this hard and fast rule is the musical episode, Once More with Feeling. Compare the cinematography there to other Whedon-directed episodes, and you'll see a gigantic difference in everything from camera placement to the blocking of actors - a trend that continued in the episodes of Firefly that Joss directed (Firefly was shot for 16x9 for every episode).
The following example comes from one of Buffy's finest episodes, The Body, which (along with the provided Whedon DVD audio commentary excerpt in white text) shows that Whedon was under no studio coercion, but has ALWAYS gone for 4x3:
"We're actually coming up on one of my favorite shots that I ever composed. And it's very simple... which is this:
Buffy - 4x3 screen shot
Very simply, it's an over, where I squeezed her into the frame as much as possible so that it's like she didn't have room to maneuver.
[...] A normal over would have been her with a tiny slice of his shoulder. Instead I let his shoulder own the frame. [...] It's an obvious thing, not great filmmaking, but when I did it on the day I saw the over and thought, "He's a little too much in the frame. Keep pushing it. Keep pushing. Giver her less room, give her less room." It excited me. It made me realize that something not particularly clever but useful could just appear on the day."
So there you've heard from the man himself. And now, here's the same shot as it appears in widescreen:
Buffy - 16x9 screen shot
And, just in case Whedon's intent (and the visual evidence of it) isn't enough, you should know that there are many instances in Buffy episodes where, when presented in 16x9 format, you can see crew members, mic booms, light stands and other production "gremlins" that inadvertently strayed into the frame. These are not normally visible in the intended 4x3 format.
On a final note, the only place where Buffy is shown in broadcast widescreen is England, where old 4x3 programming has the top and bottom chopped off so Nigel Sixpack (as opposed to Joe here in the States) can fill his widescreen television. The bottom line is that asking that Buffy be presented in 16x9 is just as compromising to the originally artistic vision as making a pan & scan version of a widescreen film. Buffy should no more be widescreen than Citizen Kane. Thanks to Christian Preischl for the screen shots and transcript excerpts used above.
Okay, Bill here again. So there you have it. The reality is that everyone is going to have their own opinion on this issue. I've already read a couple reviews around the Net from fans who viewed the U.K. Buffy: Season Four DVDs in 16x9 and much preferred them to the U.S. 4x3 versions. But the consensus from most knowledgable fans, and the final word on the subject from Whedon himself, is that full frame's the word for Buffy. So there. And with that, we are officially done with this issue here at The Bits.
), but most TV shows aren't shot on film, they are shot on video cameras (I believe B5 was an exception here).
