Mondo Knows Facts
The 180 degree rule keeps screen space consistent
Cameras stay on one side of an imaginary line between two people When two characters face each other, the camera stays on one side of an imaginary line joining them, so one always appears on the left of frame and the other on the right. Crossing the line disorients the viewer because the characters seem to swap places. Editors call the mistake jumping the axis. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Conversation scenes are built from opposing camera anglesShot and reverse shot are filmed separately and edited to look continuousThe script supervisor tracks continuityThey note what each actor wore, held and said so matching shots agreeThe bone to satellite cut spans millenniaKubrick cut from a thrown bone to an orbiting satellite in one frameBreathless used jump cuts to break continuityJean-Luc Godard cut inside scenes, making time appear to skipMelies found the substitution splice by accidentA jammed camera turned a passing bus into a hearse, and he used itThe negative cutter assembles the original filmThey match the edit list to the camera negative and cement each shot in order
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Tags: editing, continuity, grammar
The 180 degree rule keeps screen space consistent: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Cameras stay on one side of an imaginary line between two people. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.