Rules and Technique

I present you with one technique and two rules —although there are definitely more— that have great significance in the film-making industry.

Cutting the action.

One of the most important techniques in film is cutting the action. I'm not entirely certain what the exact term for this technique would be, but I felt that calling it this way was more or less appropriate as you shall see.

Whenever there is a cut from one angle to another, it is quite a significant change and it's easy to feel disoriented and displeased. Film-makers have found that one way to work around this dramatic shift in tertiary motion can be assuaged by cutting a person in the middle of his action and continuing it in the next shot.

When the attention of the audience is focused, albeit discreetly, on what the actors are doing and their actions, creating a cut to change angle does not interfere in the least. As long as an action is cut and continued over seamlessly into the next one, the audience will be paying so much attention to the action itself that they will not notice or heed any tertiary motion. Thus the editing becomes invisible. If you ignore this rule, you will create slight discomfort and move towards disjunctive editing.



The 30 degree rule

The 30 degree rule is well-known across the the film-making industry. It is one of the most important rules, and if broken it will definitely look disjunctive regardless of anything else you do.

The 30 degree rule basically stipulates that any second shot in a scene must have at least a 30 degree angle difference with the previous one. The result is a seamless experience. The opposite of that would in fact make the audience uncomfortable and feel as though something strange had just occurred. This in turn makes the editing process extremely visible and, unless that is your purpose, is ill-advised.


The 180 degree rule

The 180 degree rule is similar to the 30 degree rule in its mandate: To not confuse your audience or to upset them. Violation of this rule does not necessarily make the film disjunctive, but it feels wrong and can be interpreted as deliberately confusing.

This rule states that an imaginary line must exist that divides the world perfectly in half, which is referred to as the axis line. The camera man is on either one side or the other, but cannot travel over that line through the use of tertiary motion. That is, a film should not cut between two sides of a conflict, conversation or whatnot. Thus, the 180 degree rule is meant to keep the world oriented. If you ignore this rule, you switch that orientation each time and I guarantee you'll make a lot of enemies.





To summarize:

These rules are not meant to be ignored, at least not if you're trying to create an experience that is seamless. If your objective is to revise these rules or to deliberately question them, that is another matter and it is quite permissible.