In my post Framing exercise, Paul helped me come to the realisation that I had broken one very important rule … I had crossed THE line.

I managed to shoot my frames outside of the 180 degree guideline and as a result the frames just don’t match. Luckily for me the following class we conducted an exercise that played with the boundary of THE line.

We took a scene from Mad Men and replicated it. Setting up 3 cameras and two monitors we were able to see how the frames would then be seen when played back. It was a basically a live stream straight from the camera to the monitor which allowed us to really dig deep and deconstruct the frames in correlation to each other.

We begun with setting it up the right way, the same way as we saw in Mad Men, and then… we crossed the line. We took one of the cameras from the opposite angle, or better know as the other side of the line. At first, I didn’t see the issue and at a glance as it sometimes hard to see, but when looking at the monitors side to side it becomes quite clear that the actors seem to be walking from different angles, looking into blank spaces instead of at each other and as a result it breaks the continuity.

This was a really important task for me to have been a part of. I had made the mistake once before, as I didn’t have monitors to refer back to, nor did I have multiple cameras, a mistake like this can easily be made. After conducting this experiment the need of the line has become clear and is a key aspect to consider when it comes to continuity, especially in drama.