In filmmaking, whilst mistakes can often be costly and detrimental, they are also highly important in learning the right way to do things and the wrong way. Luckily for a group I was in, our mistake was no disaster as we were working on a casual class exercise. Upon watching the finished product, Robin probed the class to point out this mistake. There were the obvious answers such a overexposure etc but no one seemed to pick up on the fact that we had crossed the line. Initially I was very confused as to how we managed to do this. However after Robin’s persistence despite our blank expressions and a few diagrams, I grasped the concept and remembered how I had actually learnt this before but under the name of the 180 degree rule. The basic principle is that you film in a 180 degree arc and do not cross this line to avoid disorienting or confusing your viewer. In our case, Robin claimed that an actor had motioned in the wrong direction to another actor. We were insistent that she hadn’t on the day of filming but it appeared that she had because we had crossed the line. In this way crossing the line can break a scene but done well and creatively, it can be used as a tool. An example of this is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night Rises. In his interrogation scene, Nolan continually crosses the line in an effort to disorient his audience and covey Batman’s loss of control. This makes for a highly successful and engaging scene despite his breaking of the 180 degree rule.

This mistake has given me a new found appreciation of class exercises. Whilst things can often work in theory, most problems are only encountered when doing practical work. Furthermore, this problem was only pointed out to us because our work was being critically reviewed. It is not enough to simply make something and be done with it, one must analyse it and consider how things can be done better next time.