Don’t cross the line!

With many people now videoing themselves and editing using on-phone apps, I was reminded this morning of ‘not crossing the line’…

Imagine you are filming an interview with 2 people and you want to film a reverse shot – so you can edit parts of the interview out. You can position the reversal camera anywhere can’t you? Actually the answer is an emphatic ‘NO’!

Imagine you are filming from the front and you move the camera 180 degrees and film from the back – suddenly your interviewer is not on the left of screen but on the right and the viewer is confused! Fortunately there is a simple solution – ‘the line’.

Imagine drawing a line on the floor cutting the room in half. This line can be at any angle, but is often across the ‘set’. The rule is you never cross over that line and film from the other side. Stick to that and you will never have a jarring jump shot.

If you know the order of your shots, it’s perfectly OK to move the line with each shot – e.g. if you know you are going to a reversal, make the line diagonal and keep on the same side of it for the reversal. In practice that means you should never have a reversal 180 degrees from the former shot – but if you have an interim shot that moves ‘the line’ a little it is then possible to get to that position.

Example of a ‘line’

In this example the line is illustrated by the semicircles. It is across the set and all camera angles are kept to the shaded side of the line. It could, however, have been drawn the other way, separating the 2 actors. The rule is you can never cross the line in the next shot.