Crossing the line was brought to my attention in week 2 when Robin had edited some of our footage which we shot the day before, into coherent sequences. I filmed a piece with three characters. A male character walks into the scene, sits down at a cafe table in the ‘imagined staging’. Two female characters come in to the cafe and sit down nearby in the foreground (when wide shot is taken where all characters can be seen). The two females discuss the man in the foreground. I captured their conversation using CU shots of the two individually. However, I failed to realise that the angles at which I shot them, would not read-well.
Robin pointed this out to our class and we went into depth about how important it is to make sure you do not ‘cross the line’ when filming, to make sure an audience can understand the positioning of subjects. When shooting a scene from a particular side of the action, the initial angle chosen for that scene, must be cohesive with the next.
Here is a clip I have found which explains ‘crossing the line’ in a more visually expressive way than purely in writing…