I’m an aspiring cinematographer and have been attending film school for about a year. I’m still confused about what people refer to when mentioning the 180-degree rule. I have searched for what it refers to, but nothing gets me to comprehend it. Sorry for the stupid question, eli5?
In: 6
I was taught it was called screen direction. Basically, when you are putting a scene together, you can compose it of multiple angles, but all of those shots must be within a 180° angle of each other. This is so everything stays going in relatively the same direction.
Let’s say we have a scene that consists of a person walking down a road. If we start with a shot of them walking left to right, we don’t want any shots that would include them walking right to left (which would require the camera to move outside of that 180° arc). If we did include that shot of moving right to left, then it look as if the person turned around and started walking back where they came from.
You could also include left to right and right to left shots together, as long as you don’t mix moving toward the camera or away from the camera shots.
The best way to explain it is to see an example of the rule being broken. [Example at 0:11](https://youtu.be/QtyrqdK9wi0) the two people appear to switch places because the camera moves to the other side of them.
Of course this rule can sometimes be broken if you use it in such a way that fits thematically with what’s happening in the story. It also doesn’t need to persist throughout the whole scene, mostly just from shot to shot, you shouldn’t swing the camera more than 180°, but if you only operate within a single 180° arc, all of your shots can be rearranged in post production and it can be ensured that all shots can fit together without breaking the rule.
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