The 180 Degree Rule!!

The picture above will help illustrate what the 180 degree rule adds to a piece of film.
In simple terms two characters (or other elements) should always have a left/right relationship with each other. If the camera passes over this imaginary axis that is linking the two subjects, it confuses the audience as the subjects have essentially swapped positions. This is known as crossing the line. It would appear to the audience that the subjects aren’t actually communicating with each other; basically it looks bad and doesn’t flow like it should do.

In our piece of film we used the 180 degree rule in the catching of the keys and also within the passing of dialogue. However rather than leave the camera in one position we felt it would be more effective to enhance the throw and catch of the keys by moving the camera around a little. When experimenting like this it can either work out as a complete success or just end in total failure, I think we as a group made the right decision and feel that it adds a greater depth to the clip.

Experimenting in the preliminary will help our group when it comes to making the final task as it aids in our technical decisions because we have background knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.
Here is a link to an extract of our preliminary involving the 180 degree rule:

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Preliminary Task!!!!

This post is all to do with our PRELIMINARY TASK!

The task that was assigned to us was relatively simple, to produce a 45 second clip which contained an exchanging of dialogue between two characters. The clip needed to have a wide range of camera angles, involve match on action and the 180 degree rule, (all things I will post explanations of later). I believe we were given this preliminary task to help us gain new skills and get familiar with the camera’s and the software we would be using in the upcoming months.

First off we needed to form a group; I chose to go into a group of 4 containing all people I felt were trustworthy and hard working. The group being Michael Casson, Robert Schwarz, Billy Nairn and Myself. We all sat down and gathered our ideas together, the easiest way to do this was to create a quick spider diagram. After removing the ideas that were deemed impossible to do with the equipment available we were left with a clip loosely based around the mystery/thriller genre.

Once we had arrived at the decision for the clip to be a mystery/thriller genre we had to come up with a location in which to shoot the clip. The location needed to fit in well with the chosen genre so we needed a place that would seem sort of creepy yet have the required resources that we need to shoot a good clip i.e. lighting etc. After much thought we decided on the old science corridor, which is no longer in use, this seem to fit in well with our chosen needs. Here is a picture of our chosen location:

Before we set about filming we decided on making a story board showing step -by -step shots which we could piece together and create our clip, here is a picture of our story board: