On one of my shoots recently, a producer suddenly exclaimed, “You’re jumping the axis!” In all honesty, I haven’t heard this phrase in a while. Nowadays, this is either common knowledge or doesn’t make any difference for a particular video. In films, on the other hand, it’s a completely different story. The 180-degree rule is a set-in-stone convention, and breaking it becomes a powerful storytelling tool. What effect can crossing the line create on the audience? Let’s take a look at some film examples and break them down! Knowing the rules and breaking them are two sides of a coin. That is, if you want to use camera language intentionally and choose your visual tools according to what you need to achieve in a scene. It’s called “effective images,” and we observe their craft in detail here. In the case of crossing the axis, the same principle applies not to a single shot but to a sequence of shots. Thus, you don’t only think about frames but also how they should match in the edit. The convention of not crossing the line Let’s revisit the theoretical basics first. What is the “180-degree rule”? In the MZed course “Fundamentals of Directing,” filmmaker and educator from the International Film Institute of NY, Kyle Wilamowski, calls it “maybe the most important rule in the grammar of directing“: The 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. A quote from...
Published By: CineD - Friday, 7 March, 2025