Chapter 10 - Directional Continuity

Constant Screen Direction | masking Direction Changes | The technique of Distraction | Other Methods | Directional Continuity in Travel Sequences | Contrasting Screen Direction | Clean Entrances and Exits | Cleanness Through Mechanical Effects | Summary

Constant Screen Direction

The screen has unlimited power of illusion. But "illusion" is not far removed in sound or spelling from "confusion," and the unwary cameraman will often find his camera prankishly playing tricks on his audience against his best wishes and intentions.

We have said before and resoundingly say again that the cameraman must enable his audience to see the action on­screen the way he—the cameraman—sees it in reality. He must continuously take into account the fact that what he sees directly with the freedom and mobility of his eyes, is seen at second hand by the audience on a screen of rigid di­mensions. The eye can pick and choose, but the screen imposes its story on the audience.

This is the danger of screen illusion. It can make confusing little, simple acts which are never misconstrued by the human eye when it sees them in real life.

Take the matter of movement. You come across a parade on an avenue in your home town, and the marchers move across your vision from left to right. You cross the street and look back: the paraders march now from right to left. This is per­fectly understandable to you, so understandable that you never stop to think consciously of it. Your mind has automatic­ally taken into account the shift in your position to a reverse angle of view, from which things naturally take the opposite aspect; you are fully aware that the parade is still moving in the same forward direction.Y

But if you were to make motion pictures of that parade, first from one side of the street, and then from the other, the marchers would appear to be moving in exactly opposite di­rections on the strict; the audience could not help being some­what bewildered. lacking an explanation on the screen for the change.

The first answer to the problem presented by a confusing position change is: Avoid it. Do so by maintaining constant screen direction. If you shoot a sequence of the marchers, keep them moving in the same direction in all shots. If they move initially from left to right, keep all shots left to right; if they start from right to left, keep all shots right to left. Try to avoid direction changes between shots.

Change of Screen Direction
(Where in the action explains the change)

Top to Bottom

Establishing Shot	Medium Shot
Medium Shot	Reestablishing  Shot
Closeup

The same logic applies to more intimate movie subjects. Take, as an example, Mother with little sister Betty in the park playing with a ball; you want to shoot a sequence show­ing her going to get that ball and returning to Mother with it. Change of direction is obviously going to be involved, but you have no problem as long as you make sure your camera tells the whole story. You shoot an LS showing the two subjects and the start of the action, move in for an MS of Betty going after the ball, follow that with a CU cut-in of her hand crasp-ing the ball, then move back to an MS showing her turning with the ball now in her hand, and finish the sequence with an LS of her coming back to Mother in the opposite direction. The CU cut-in and the Following MS showing the turn are your key shots here; they reconcile the audience to the direc­tion change; they are easy to make yet the lack of them would make the sequence confusing. The success of directional con­tinuity depends very often on not neglecting elementary shots.

Masking Direction Changes

Trouble may arise, however, in sequences where the action moves only one way but where, in order to photograph the story properly, you cannot avoid shots with different screen directions.

It may happen in the case of the parade that colorful back­grounds on both sides of the street compel you to shoot from either side, with resultant changes in screen direction of the marchers. Again, on a boat trip down a riser, your picture might show departure from a river town on one side and arrival at a river town on the other side. En route, you might wish to photograph interesting buildings or scenery on either bank or boats passing on cither side of you.

Obviously, switching back and forth from one side to the other would make many changes of screen direction inevit­able; confusion would be possible.

Confusion would be possible, but not inevitable. That same power of screen illusion which creates all this directional trouble now comes to the rescue. It can be applied to avoid confusion in several ways, but there is one technique that is far and away the best because it is most effective and most easily and universally used. That is distraction.

The Technique of  Distraction

Using the versatile cinema tools of cut-in and cut-away, dis­traction exploits the continuity truism mentioned previously: An audience, always looking ahead to what is coming on the screen rarely keeps in mind more than one scene prior to the one it is looking at.

The distraction technique separates scenes of a sequence which have conflicting screen directions by an intermediate shot—or shots (it is always better to have two or more instead of just one) in which there is no cross-screen direction of movement.

If cut-ins are used, the shots can be head-ons, tail-aways. or both. The parade will serve as an example. You are shooting the procession as it passes from left to right when you notice you are on the same side of the street as the reviewing stand Since your climactic scene is to be the marchers passing in front of this most important background, you must cross the street to shoot it. But a shot from that side would show the marchers from right to left. So, before changing over, you take a cut-in shot in which the screen direction is neutral.

You step into the gap between two groups of marchers and photograph either the first group from the rear as it moves away from die camera, or the second group from the front as it moves toward the camera. In these shots the marchers do not have cross-screen direction; your audience ceases to be conscious of any such direction; and the climactic shot may therefore be taken without confusion from the other side of the street and show a right-left direction.

Cut-aways,  similarly   used,  product'   the   same   distraction even more effectively, because their subject, although related to the main action, is completely separate from it.

In the case of the parade, cut-aways may consist of specta­tors, of confetti raining down from the buildings of flags fly­ing along the line of march. Such shots take your audience eye completely away from the parade and the direction in which it is moving. If you then switch back to the parade from a dif­ferent side of the street, your audience is not confused because it will have forgotten the original screen direction.

The boat-trip example has plenty of opportunities tor cut­away distraction shots in closeups of passengers, of sailors, of boat-details like pennants flying, hawsers being hauled in and carefully piled, furrows cut in the water by the ship's prow.

To avoid a troublesome misconception in the reader's mind. we wish to bring out here an important point that is properly a function of editing.

It is not necessary to shoot distraction shots in the exact order in which they appear on the screen. It might prove to be much easier, much more convenient to film the spectators or the flags at the parade after all the marchers have passed; or the details aboard ship at the beginning or end of the trip. The important thing is that when the film is finally edited, the distraction scenes be cut into the action where they may do their duty of masking changes of screen direction. The end product—what the audience sees on the screen—is the important thing.

Other Methods

The resources of screen illusion can be applied in specialized cases to deceiving an audience into accepting a reversal of screen direction.

An example is the boat trip down the river where you con­stantly have to switch the camera from one hank to the other. Ask some lens struck spectator (whom you're sure to find in any situation!) to pose as an actor for you. Frame him in the foreground as lie looks over the rail at the river bank which is moving by from left to right.

Now ask your actor to turn his head so that his gaze shifts to the other side. Shoot his action with the camera. That simple action of turning his head has suggested a change of direction. You can now shoot the other bank of the river from right to left and your audience will accept the reversal con­tentedly.

Still another way of keeping your audience satisfied about screen direction is to keep the same landmark, symbol, or ob­ject in the background in successive shots with different screen directions, so that its position in regard to the action keeps the direction of movement clear.

To illustrate: You are shooting a sequence of Mother clip­ping roses from a bush in front of the house. Mr. Montgomery, your neighbor, walks by from right to left. He is dressed carefully, his step is brisk, he is very, very definitely going somewhere.

When he sees Mother, however, he stops for a moment to say hello and to admire the roses. On the spur of the moment you decide to "shoot him into the story." Your establishing shot was from out in the street, with the rosebush behind Mr. Montgomery. It is to his right, in the direction from which he has come.

You close in for MS s and CU's, but to get a fresh angle and to fill up your background as much as possible with that hand­some rosebush  you change to a shooting position on the lawn on the other side of Mr. Montgomery. The rosebush is now on his left.

Mr. Montgomery is in very much of a hurry, unfortunately. and waits only until you finish your MS before he rushes off. As he leaves, you manage to pan him away and let him walk out of the frame, but now his screen direction is from left to right. There has been do time for distraction cut-ins, no time to switch back to your original angle from the street.

   But the rosebush is still behind him. He has had his back to it consistently while he spoke to Mother and the audience will know that he has not changed but is moving in one con­stant direction all  the time—away from the rosebush.

The use of this method of masking direction changes is limited, of course, to scenes where a prominent, recognizable object is consistently to be seen and where the position of that object relative to the action helps keep direction clear. It would do no good at all to have a conspicuous building or landmark in the background if the action inexplicably moved first one way, then another, in front of it.

A sensitivity to screen direction is one of the refinements o) good continuity and helps differentiate between the button-pusher and the trained cameraman.

Directional Continuity In Travel  Sequences

Whenever a considerable amount of travel is being record ed on film, directional continuity becomes more important than ever. This is not only because you must avoid confusing your audience about which nay you arc going, but also be­cause you have to convince it that you ere getting there.

If you film your own travelogue of a vacation trip to New York City from somewhere out West, the same screen direc­tion should be maintained regardless ot the time interval be­tween shots.

Let's say   you're shooting   your  arrival   at, and departure limn, a picturesque lodge where you stay overnight en route You shoot the car as your wife drives it up to the lodge en­trance from left to right. Next morning, when your wife drives off, make sure that she goes out of the frame to the right. If she drives off to the left—in the opposite direction—the audi­ence will feel that you are going back to where you came from The actual time interval between shots was many hours; on screen it is no more than a split second. That is how celluloid gremlins make illusion work the wrong wax.

So great is the power of movie suggestion that sometimes you must "cheat" on the truth about screen direction. In this particular example, to get to the main highway again and re­sume your trip, you may actually have to retrace your en­trance and drive oft to the left. But if you filmed the truth, your audience would get the feeling that you were going back where you came from. Therefore, rather than go through all the trouble of explaining to your audience that you are not going back where you came from but are reversing direction only momentarily in order to get to the main highway before resuming; true direction it is much easier simply to drive off to the right in your film, stop the camera, turn your car around, and proceed merrily on your way.

Regard for the power of movie suggestion applies even to in­significant-appearing details of screen direction. If you shoot an insert of a map as your wife's hand traces your route on it. then follow with a shot of tin- car actually en route, be sure that the screen direction of both your wife's hand and the moving car are identical. Even in small things you should keep the illusion of constant screen direction unruffled.

Contrasting Screen Direction
(To create suspense)
 

LS  (Aunt Sally, r. to I.)

LS   (Junior,   I.   to   r.)                   MS (Junior,  I. to r.)

MS   (Aunt   Sally,   r.   to   I.)                Reestablishing   Shot
(climax   of   sequence)

Contrasting Screen   Direction

A reasonable inference from this discussion of changes in screen direction is that the whole matter is a nuisance, and that our preoccupation with it is wholly negative—to prevent audience confusion.

Once again, however, we find a continuity cloud that has a silver lining. Opposing screen directions can be used for positive purposes and do not present merely a negative prob­lem. When different actors or actions are involved, they can create a very powerful feeling of suspense.

This effect is brought about by contrasting screen direc­tions. Suppose you want to show two persons approaching each other. Their meeting will be the climax of the sequence. You want to build up to that climax; make the audience look forward to it eagerly, expectantly. Aunt Sally, for example. is coming to visit you. You wish to show Junior walking down the street to meet her, eager to see what toy or candy she has brought this time.

Simple and obvious as this story is. you can easily build up real audience suspence by individual shots of each subject moving  in opposite or contrasting directions.

First you shoot an LS of Aunt Sally approaching from right to left, followed by an LS of Junior as he looks expectant­ly off-screen to the right and starts to move in that direction. Next you take an MS of Aunt Sally waving and moving closer from right to left, and then one of Junior picking up speed from left to right. If you wish, you can add separate closeups with each subject still moving in contrasting directions. Fin­ally, in a reestablishing shot, you hit the grand climax as the two meet and Aunt Sally lifts and swings Junior in her arms.

Although Junior and Aunt Sally do not actually come to­gether until the final scene, the contrasting screen directions of each give the audience a mounting anticipation of that coming-together. The alternating, increasingly close shots produce a feeling of excitement the audience will not experi­ence if you shoot the entire sequence with both subjects on the screen at the same time.

This method of creating suspense is an old movie standby It is used to create a feeling of fearful expectation in murder movies: the killer is shown stalking through the shadows from one direction in one scene, while in the next his unknowing victim appears moving toward him the opposite way.

Every "horse opera" with its big climax of cowboys racing toward a meeting with a horde of Indians uses contrasting screen direction to build up the feeling of inevitable clash With cowboys coming from left to right and Indians from right to left, the audience knows they are bound to meet. Excitement mounts accordingly.

But note—and note carefully—that constant screen direc­tion is maintained for each subject. The cowboys, whenever they appear on the screen, are always coming from left to right, and the Indians always from right to left. If this con­stant) were violated, if in one shot the Indians were shown moving from left to right, the audience impression would no longer be that they were running headlong toward a clash, but that they were running away, trying to escape from the cow­boys!

Left,   Top   to   Bottom	Right,   Top   to  Bottom
Constant   Screen   Direction	Confused   Screen   Direction

And the confusion would become indescribable1 if directions were continually changed back and forth, both for the cowboys and the Indians. The audience could not be blamed for bewilderedly concluding that there were not two but a half-dozen different groups chasing and fleeing from each other all over the ma]).

So when using contrasting screen directions, make sure your individual actions maintain constant screen direction. The idea is to create suspense, not confusion. Clean  Entrances And   Exits It you sat in the living room, closed your eyes for a moment. then opened them to find one of the family sitting in a hith­erto vacant chair, you would certainly be startled. You would pop out the question: "How did you get there!" Your surprise would be involuntary even though a moment's reflec­tion would tell you that the person had simply walked in.

A reaction of surprise would be just as inevitable if you closed your eyes again, and found on opening them once more that the occupant of the chair had vanished.

This shock of surprise affects a movie audience just as strongly when someone suddenly appears or disappears on the screen without the action's being accounted tor. The cameraman may get away with popping people on and off the screen without explanation in trick photograph) whose pur­pose is deliberately to puzzle or dumbfound the audience. Pictorial continuity, however, has just the opposite objective. In the normal film, therefore, where clarity and cohesion are sought, a person on-screen should be shown coming from somewhere when he arrives on the scene and from some­where when he departs from the scene.

The necessity for this seems childishly self-evident. It is not self-evident on the screen unless your actor makes clean screen exits and   entrances.
If you're shooting a christening in the family and want to

make a sequence of Uncle Hal congratulating the beaming parents, let him make a complete, clean entrance by coming in from outside the frame. The same goes for his departure. Let him leave the scene by walking completely out of the frame.

However—and this is a very important "however"—clean screen exits and entrances are imperative only when the pres­ence of the actor concerned has not been registered in the es­tablishing scene. If, for instance, in the opening scene of the movie you show Uncle Hal already talking to the happy parents, his presence is established; the audience accepts him the same way it assumes that an actor it sees onstage in a play when the curtain rises has already made a logical en­trance. Nor does Uncle Hal have to make a clean entrance it you precede his MS or CU by an LS showing him in a group of guests being greeted by the parents; his presence is estab­lished by the group shot.

The same logic applies to clean exits. Uncle Hal need not move individually out of the frame unless the very next shot shows the group without Uncle Hal. In that case you have to walk him out to explain his disappearance.

Whenever you shoot clean screen entrances and exits, make sure they are really clean. That is to say, if you want a clean entrance of Uncle Hal. don't skimp on film by waiting for him to enter the frame of your viewfinder before starting to shoot. Let him come in cleanly from outside the frame. The same goes for his departure. When lie takes leave of his hosts, don't stop shooting just as he approaches the other side of the frame.

Clean screen entrances and exits eliminate awkwardness and are always more dramatic. The extent to which they affect smoothness of continuity was stressed in our discussion of pan­ning, where we saw that there was a distressing jump in the action whenever it did not go cleanly out of the frame.

Actors in stage plays make clean-cut entrances and exits. Let your movie subjects do the same. They do not have to come through a door, window, or gate as a stage actor must, they need only come from beyond the screen boundry—and go out beyond it.

Cleanness Through Mechanical Effects

Clean entrances and clean exits can be implied by the use of certain mechanical effects to make transitions between se­quences. These effects, whose names are very nearly self-explanatory, are fade-ins, fade-outs, dissolves. blur pans, and wipes. All of them, excepting complicated wipes, are within range of the camera facilities available to the average camera­man.

In a fade-out, the scene progressively darkens until it be­comes completely black. It clearly implies the end of a se­quence, whether the action moves out of the frame or remains within it. Aunt Sally s departure after paying Mother a visit would be definitely understood whether you faded out on her standing in the doorway saying goodbye to Mother or actually walking down the steps to the gate. The finality of her de­parture is clearly implied by the fade-out even though she does not move out of the frame in a true clean exit.

A fade-in is the exact opposite of the fade-out and carries with it the idea of a clean entrance. To suggest Aunt Sally's arrival you could fade in on her as she stood in the doorway greeting Mother. The fade-in as definitely implies arrival as the fade-out implies departure. If you wanted to emphasize the idea of her arrival even more strongly, you could fade in on her as she came up the steps to the door.

In a dissolve, one scene melts right into a following scene so that for an instant, before the new scene entirely replaces the old one, the audience gets the effect of a double exposure. The dissolve combines the ideas of clean exit and clean entrance implied separately by the fade-out and fade-in. In your se­quence of Aunt Sally's arrival, you could use a dissolve by mak­ing a shot of her coming up the steps to be greeted by Mother. fade out, then run back the film to the point where you started to fade out, then fade in on the new scene showing her sitting in the living room, chatting with Mother over a cup of tea. Thus, in a sense you fade out on her coming to the door and fade in on her seated in the living room.

The blur pan (sometimes known professionally as a swish pan) is made by panning the camera from a normal scene with extreme rapidity, so fast that the subject is completely, unrec­ognizably blurred. Your next scene is shot in normal fashion. When you edit the film, you merely cut the new scene into the blur pan properly. For instance, you're doing a travel movie and want to exit out of a snowy Northern city and come in on a sunny Southern beach. Your first scene shows you loading your car in a snowstorm and driving off; suddenly it zooms into a blur pan which stops equally suddenly at a new scene showing you unloading the car in front of a hotel laid in a semi-tropical setting of bright sunshine and waving palm trees. When you edit the film, you simply cut the blur pan in be­tween the two scenes to gain the desired effect.

In a wipe, one scene replaces another so that parts of both are on the screen simultaneously. There is no "blending" of scenes as in a dissolve; instead, the scenes appear adjacent to one another with clean-cut lines of demarcation between.

The most elementary wipe is the push-off, wherein one scene appears to be pushing off the preceding scene, with a frame line separating the two: Aunt Sally's arrival would be pushed off the screen by the living-room scene. This sort of simple wipe is within the range of the home cutter, but for more complicated ones, expensive optical devices and trained technicians are required. For these specialists there is no limit to the variety and complexity of wipes they can produce on request: spiral wipes, iris wipes, burst wipes, to mention but a few of the endless possibilities for design and dramatic effect.
Warning: These mechanical effects have the function of bridging sequences—they are transition shots. They should not be used as substitutes for clean entrances and exits be­tween shots of a sequence. Their purpose is to connect se­quences smoothly. The idea of clean entrances and exits which they imply is strictly a secondary use.

It would be silly if you faded in and out between shots of Aunt Sally saying her farewells to each member of the family, or faded out on her as she stood in the doorway saying good­bye and then faded in again as she went down the steps. The actual transition in time would not be great enough to justify  the fades. The same is true of a dissolve, wipe, or blur pan. Don't fritter away these camera effects. Hold hack on them for those occasions when they can  do the most for pictorial continuity.

Summary

Changes of screen direction, unaccounted for by the action, confuse the audience.

This contusion can be avoided by maintaining constant screen direction: that is. by keeping the action on-screen mov­ing consistent]) From left to right or from right to left.

When it is impossible to avoid reversals of screen direction unaccounted for by the action, changes of direction can be masked in several ways.

One method, depending on distraction, draws the audi­ence's attention away from the fact that a direction change has been made, by shooting the action in cut-ins, especially head-ons and tail-aways, SO that no cross-screen direction of movement is apparent. Distraction can also be achieved through the use of cut-aways.

Other methods of masking direction change include that of deception, which suggests change; and that of the use ot the outstanding landmark or fixed background object.

In travel movies, constant screen direction is necessary not only to make clear to the audience which way the subject is going hut also to convince it that the subject is getting there. Directional continuity must be maintained in little touches throughout the travel sequence.

Opposing screen directions of different actors or actions create suspense by contrast.
Contrasting screen direction is effective because constant screen direction is maintained for each subject. Violation
of this constancy leads inevitably to confusion.

Clean screen entrances and exits are important. Entering a scene, the subject should come cleanly into the frame from beyond it: leasing, he should go cleanly out of the frame. Audience surprise and confusion will result otherwise.

Clean exits and entrances may be implied by certain mechanical effects produced by the cameraman or cutter for transitions between sequences. These effects are known as lade-ins, fade-outs, dissolves, blur pans, and wipes. Wipes. however, demand the services of a specialist.

The exits and entrances implied in the use of these ef­fects are strictly secondary to their transition function. Such effects are not substitutes for complete clean entrances and exits.

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