Let's do a psychology experiment.
Let's show our audience a scene consisting of eight shots
and the story it tells is suspicious but a little ambiguous
and open to interpretation.
A girl's in her apartment when a guy walks suspiciously past her window.
She goes outside to check it out.
After the video, we ask our audience
a couple open-ended questions
and see what they think about it.
How did it make them feel, did they like it,
did they not like it, stuff like that.
Now let's show that same video to a different audience
but change one thing.
Mirror every shot
so now every movement left-to-right becomes right-to-left.
The question is, does this edit change anything?
Does character direction affect how the audience perceives the character
or the entire scene as a whole?
The answer is yes, and a lot more than you think.
But why does it matter which way he went?
To understand why direction change is so important,
we have to talk about the three axes of movement.
There are three directions on screen a character can move.
Right and left, up and down and forward and backward.
The direction a character moves matters in a scene.
Moving towards the camera shows power, domination and aggression
and moving away shows weakness.
Similarly, characters being looked down on appear weak
and high up characters are much more dominant.
"Now my evil power will be unlimited!
"Can you feel me?"
- "I can feel you."
- "Whoo!"
These two explanations make sense.
Of course someone low and far away from the camera
will be perceived differently from someone high up and close.
[Child screams]
[Monster starts screaming as well]
But the final character movement, lateral movement,
going from right to left, is a lot less obvious.
What makes one side of the screen different from the other?
Why does movement right to left matter?
The answer comes from time and language.
In Western culture, left to right indicates the progression of time.
Our language reads from left to right.
Books begin from the left and finish once we get to the right.
In video games, players start on the left side
and finish the level on the right.
On any line graph, time increases as we move right.
In our everyday life, movement towards the right
indicates time, progress and normality,
and movement towards the left indicates moving back in time,
abnormality and regression.
From this thinking came the theory amongst film scholars
that people will interpret left-to-right movement
as more natural and normal than right-to-left movement
because of how our brains naturally process moving images.
And this idea of time and normality in left-to-right movement gets applied
in a variety of films.
For example: Lord of the Rings maintains its left-to-right movement
during the journey from the Shire to Mount Doom.
Left-right movement is maintained during the big travel shots
and it's a subtle visual to indicate the clear goal
to reach a specific destination.
Compare that clear objective to the last scene in Full Metal Jacket.
It consists of two shots.
One shot of soldiers moving left to right past burning buildings,
and another shot of them moving right to left
with burning buildings still in the background.
The abrupt lateral direction change
makes it look as if they randomly switch directions,
and it gives the implication that the soldiers are wandering aimlessly.
Stanley Kubrick uses lateral direction change to make some commentary
about the army's unclear objectives
and perhaps commentary on the Vietnam war as a whole.
Lateral character movement can also tell a story.
In one scene in Full Metal Jacket, soldiers move to the right
towards some combat zone off-screen
and wounded soldiers get carried away from the combat zone,
moving from the right side to the left.
There's a subtle visual reinforcement here
that where the soldiers headed off-screen
is where men get brought back wounded.
This lateral technique is similarly done subtly in Platoon and Saving Private Ryan.
[music plays, indisctinct voices talking]
"Wade!" - "Yes, sir."
- "See what you can do." - "Yes, sir."
So left to right is observed as positive, progressive and normal,
or at least that's what many film theorists assumed.
It's only in the last five years or so
that researchers started empirically testing lateral movement.
In 2012, Cleveland State University conducted an experiment
by showing a sequence of eight shots to a group of people.
They showed the exact same shots to another group of people,
but reversed all left-to-right movement to right-to-left movement.
Each group answered several specific questions
and several open-ended ones about how they felt after watching.
The results confirmed what many film theorists had assumed
but had never had any hard evidence to prove.
The experimenters analyzed open-ended questions for key words.
For example, 24.8% of responders used "anxious," "nervous," "uneasy," "suspenseful"
to describe the video
and 11.9% said "fearful," "frightened" or "scared."
The most statistically significant difference between the two groups
was what the experimenters called "the negative effect,"
similar phrases including "didn't like the clip," "liked the clip," "good," "bad," "interesting," "boring"
and "strong" and "weak" were the phrases that differed
the most between the two videos.
So for the left-to-right video, members consistently used words
like "good," "interesting" and "strong,"
while the ones who saw right-to-left, used words like "bad," "boring" and "weak."
Audiences perceived left-to-right movement positively and right-to-left movement negatively.
This study provides a huge opportunity for film makers.
By something as simple as switching character movement,
a director can instill a negative or positive emotional response
on the audience.
But it seems some directors have already caught on this difference
in left to right and right to left,
going as back as Alfred Hitchcock.
Alfred Hitchcock's Stranger on a Train opens with the protagonist and antagonist
showing only their feet and legs walking.
They walk towards each other, as if to imply their paths will eventually cross.
If our study is true and left-to-right movement is preceived as more positive than right-to-left,
then this opening scene has already subconsciously established
that the right-to-left character is an antagonist
and the left-to-right character is a protagonist.
So not only can left-to-right movement indicate a progression of time,
it can even indicate something positive or negative.
Roger Ebert fully supported the idea himself,
as he explains in his 2008 article "How to Read a Movie."
Roget Ebert goes further to say even the left and right sides of the screen
are perceived as either more positive or more negative.
A character on the right feels more positive and in control,
while the one on the left seems weaker, perhaps more sinister.
This is a common recurring theme: right – good, left – bad,
and various filmmakers use this technique.
"Master's my friend."
- "You don't have any friends."
"Oh, come off it."
- "You come off it!"
- "You." - "You."
- "You."
- "You infinity."
- "Ahhh!"
Ebert makes the claim that these conventions of right and left
extend beyond our language and culture.
He says that in all his years of watching movies,
Asian cinema uses similar left versus right techniques.
And the study supported this belief,
religious belief, right or left handedness and race all
did not significantly affect the audience's perception of lateral movement.
Of course there are no absolutes in filmmaking
and sometimes what's contrary to the rule works just as well.
But either way, this study shows that there really is a difference
between left and right in film.
It's only so recently that any empirical testing on film techniques has actually been conducted.
Roger Ebert's claims, while convincing, were only speculation at the time,
but have now been proven to an extent.
I contacted Cleveland State University,
the ones who published this study,
and they're still currently conducting experiments,
testing film theories on audience members.
It's really exciting to see that even after a hundred years,
we're still learning new things about filmmaking to this day.
What was once speculation has now been followed up with concrete evidence.
So the next time a character crosses the screen, ask yourself:
"Where did he go?"
- "Come on!" - "Which way did he go?"
- "Where did he go?" - "Where did he go?"
- "I don't know, he took my clothes and went that way."
- "Come on!"
Thanks for watching, I wanted to clarify the video experiment that I show
isn't the original video experiment.
The original one hasn't been published yet; it hasn't been posted,
although they published the article, they haven't posted the video that they used.
So I just took what they talked about in the article and I recreated it.
I encourage you guys to look at the original article
it's amazing, it goes very in depth, it talks about things I didn't talk about,
I'll link it in the description,
also I talk about film theorists in the video
and I don't refer to specific names,
but really I'm referring to Kuleshov.
He's the man, he's been doing all this film theory stuff.
In the seventies, he was coming up with these– this three axes of movement theory,
and how people interepret movement in film
and so I encourage you to look him up,
I'm going to add some of his writing in the description as well.
Thanks guys.