30 degree rule
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The 30° rule is a basic film editing guideline that states the camera should move at least 30° between shots of the same subject occurring in succession. This change of perspective makes the shots different enough to avoid a jump cut. Too much movement around the subject may violate the 180° rule.
As Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White suggest in The Film Experience, "The rule aims to emphasize the motivation for the cut by giving a substantially different view of the action. The transition between two shots less than 30 degrees apart might be perceived as unnecessary or discontinuous--in short, visible." (2004, 130)
The rule is actually a special case of a more general dictum that states that the cut will be jarring if the two shots being cut are so similar that there appears to be a lack of motivation for the cut. In his book In The Blink of an Eye, editor Walter Murch states: “[We] have difficulty accepting the kind of displacements that are neither subtle nor total: Cutting from a full-figure master shot, for instance, to a slightly tighter shot that frames the actors from the ankles up. The new shot in this case is different enough to signal that something has changed, but not different enough to make us re-evaluate its context.” (2006, 6)
Following this rule may soften the effect of changing shot distance, such as changing from a medium shot to a close-up.
This sequence, 15 minutes (5:43) into Rose Hobart (1936), suggests a violation of the '30° rule' [1]
The axial cut is a striking violation of this rule to obtain a certain effect.
