Camera Lesson 2 - 180 degree rule / rule of third

During this lesson, we began by learning the 180 degree rule. This means all the action must take place on a 180 degree axis. If this is crossed the camera can not reflect our own eyes and therefore the scene looks wrong. This is often demonstrated in films such as the hero will be walking in from the left and the villain from the right, because our eyes naturally gravitate from left to right, just like how we read.

After learning about this we then looked at the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds naturally, when we are looking at an image we tend to place our person in the middle of the frame, however if we think about it we are drawn to points of interest and as we read left to right we should stick it on a certain axis. We have have someone of the left hand corner with their head on one part of the third and they may be point a gun at another part of the third. an example of this is that in our classroom we have a poster of the movie 'Drive', in this poster the actor is entirely on the left hand side of the poster bt if you look at the bottom of the image you can see he is carrying a hammer, this is in the bottom third. As you focus from left to right you would notice that the hammer is the first thing we see as an audience, and then we focus in on his eyes. This is something I will be looking at and addressing in my own opening sequence, and I will be thinking of the framing and composition of the shots.

After learning about the rule of thirds we then applied this, we went back to bubbling the camera and the tripod, assembling the tripod and the camera on top, the black magic mini Ursa and then we filmed a sequence ourselves. In my sequence we had a girl walk into frame and take out her phone, look at it and put it back in her pocket and then walk off of the cameras view. We made sure she was on the 180 degree rule, we made sure she stood on one side of the 180 degree rule axis so when we focused in on her putting the phone back in her pocket we could then cut to a close up angle of her hands doing this action.

This was a basic sequence of events but it was something we needed to know in order to film because we don't want to make the mistake of not sticking to the rule when we actually film our own sequence.

In the next lesson we will be editing this together before we start to film more sequences.