The 180-Degree Rule (Teaching Film Through Mini-Lessons)

(To have a better idea of what I'm on about here, check out my previous post about teaching film through mini-lessons.)

The 180-Degree Rule in film-making is something that is taken for granted so much now that modern audiences are aware of it in only a subconscious sort of way. Basically, it refers to the fact that when two actors are conversing on the screen, the camera angles and editing used reflect the idea that they are facing one another. Even when the actors don't physically share the screen together, the shots of them should imply that they are still facing one another for their conversation. Therefore, the camera should never film them facing the same way as the person they're speaking to.

The best way to explain it is to see it, so here is a clip from Mark Cousins' The Story of Film that comes in handy as a teaching resource with my classes. It does a wonderful job of demonstrating how this rule came about and why it's used:

I have also included a diagram of the rule (seen at the top of the blog but also included as a resource below) so that students can better visualise the spatial relationship between the cameras and their subjects.

After spending a short amount of time demonstrating it to a class, I then do the best possible thing that can be done when you want to teach film - get the students to employ the technique themselves by filming a short narrative with iPads (or some other device).

I did this in conjunction with the previous mini-lesson I taught on close-ups (see link at top of article) and told the students to incorporate this rule into a part of their video. The result was a short but effective narrative that incorporated film literacy in an authentic fashion, demonstrating student knowledge of film techniques. 

Plus my class had a lot of fun with it, which is something we should never underestimate when it comes to English!

Resource: The 180-Degree Rule (PDF) 

Resource: The 180-Degree Rule (Video)

The Close Up (Teaching Film through Mini-Lessons)

Recently at my school we began working with Professor Wayne Sawyer, the Director of Research in the School of Education at Western Sydney University. The goal of this collaboration has been to improve student writing by incorporating the 'mini-lesson' approach that was pioneered and refined by prize-winning American educator Nancie Atwell. 

Something Wayne Sawyer said to our faculty in our last meeting with him was that it's sometimes helpful to get students to think about creative writing in terms of how films are cut together, and it sparked an idea in me that was only, at best, tangentially related to our mini-lessons project. 

Teachers reading this might be familiar with that gap towards the end of Term 4 where all the junior assessments have been finished, and reports are written, and students are ready to move on to their next grade. At my school, we're often left with about 5 weeks. For some classes, we just continue with their current topic and explore a few areas that might be of interest to the students, or could help set them up for the following year. For Year 10 in particular, we have a space where it's teacher's choice to do a whole topic just for fun. 

As I've mentioned previously on this blog, I had a great Year 10 class last year who were fairly focused, so in their case I decided to do some stuff on the History of Cinema. This is a personal interest area for me as I used to write quite extensively about film before I was a teacher, so I took my students all the way back to the early days of silent cinema. This provided me with an opportunity to take a grass roots approach to teaching the actual mechanics of filmmaking. 

Here's where the mini-lesson stuff comes in. I've never used iPads in the classroom before and I discussed with the class how they felt about giving them a go (with the caveat that the technology might need to be troubleshooted a bit as we went [and it did]). I applied the mini-lesson approach to teach some film techniques, making use of the absolutely brilliant and excellent documentary series The Story of Film, by Irish film critic Mark Cousins. 

(SIDE BAR: I can't recommend Mark Cousins' The Story of Film enough. If you want to know anything about film, this should be your non-negotiable first stop.)

So the first thing thing I did was show the students a short clip from the documentary (included below, though I'm happy to take it down if anyone considers it a flagrant infringement of copyright). 

This clip concerns the point in film history where the concept of a 'Close Up' was first invented. We take the visual language of cinema for granted now, so it can be eye-opening and quite illustrative to get inside the process of how these techniques first came about, and what they really meant. The clip shows one of the very first known close-ups, a sequence where the camera cuts from a mid-shot of a little girl feeding a cat to a close-up of the cat itself and then back again to the little girl. This very short instructive lesson has one simple goal: teach the students about the function of the close-up and show them what a close-up looks like.

After showing this to the students, we then got the school's set of iPads and started filming. I gave them a sheet of instructions that outlined some options for creating some shots. The goal was to create a short mini-narrative with a sequence of shots that incorporated a close-up that would build story. The results were fantastic, and I hope to show some here on the blog after securing permission.

It was a very rewarding experience for both myself and the students. Here are the resources:

Clip: The Invention of Close Ups
Sheet: Close-Up Instructions