Comics and/ or Animation Tutorial - Invisible Axis or the 180 degree rule.

Les personnages, animations et le tutoriel sont © Sirkowski, 2003

It's important when you draw your comic, your manga, your storyboard or your animation that everyone
can understand your action sequence (and when I say action, I mean litteraly any kind of action).

For exemple, two people are speaking, you want to be sure everyone will understand that they're having a face-to-face conversation...
...or if they're standing one next to the other, talking to a third person.

An easy way to do that is to avoid crossing the Invisible Axis or to break the 180 Degree Rule.

Ever noticed on a hockey rink that all the cameras are only on one side of the ice? This is to avoid breaking the Axis, since it's important in team sports to know where the players are and where they're going.

So in a hockey rink, that's easy, but what do you for a conversation between two people who are facing each other? What you need to do is set your Action Line. You can set your Action Line using the first camera angle you use, whatever it is. But be carefull, this way can be tricky, so read the rest.

The easiest and safest way is to set your Action Line from your first to your second character (or object).

Then you may move your camera freely inside that half-circle.

Also, it's also preferable that characters, no matter the camera angle, stay on the same side of the screen and look in the same direction.
Here's a bad exemple. Mr.Red and Mr.Blue are very similar characters. Because the Axis was broken, when we change camera angle, it seems Mr.Red is magicaly transforming into Mr.blue. Old school special fx...
In this good exemple, you can see that even though Mr.Red and Mr.Blue are almost twins, you easily understand who's who and where they are.

Thanks to Jack Khouri for the notes and thanks for Pierrell for the idea. There's some terms translated
from French I'm not sure of.

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