Lateral Character Movement

Lateral movement is defined as 'of, relating to, or situated at or on the side'. Therefore, lateral character movement is basically, the direction in which a character or object is travelling across the screen - this may seem like a small thing, but it can have a huge effect on the viewer and their perception of a scene.

After watching this video, I found out quite a few things. Firstly, the way a character is moving can change how you see them in terms of their personality. The video states that there are three axis a character can move on - right and left, forward and backward, and up and down. These movements are crucial to how we as an audience perceive them - a character moving forward, toward the camera, seems a lot more powerful, dominant and aggressive. A character moving away from the camera therefore seems a lot weaker, and maybe even scared.

This is all fairly obvious, as someone taller and closer is definitely going to appear more scary, and someone smaller and further away is going to seem weaker, but then the video asks, why does the lateral movement have an effect on this too? How can the way a character is moving across the screen change how we see them?

Firstly, it comes from time, language and culture. In western culture, progression is seen as going from left to right. Our writing (and the direction we read our books in) goes left to right, in videogames the characters move from the left to the right, time graphs indicate time moving on as you come from the left and move to the right - all of these things subconsciously make us feel that movement from the left to the right equals progress, time passing, and achievement. From this, many film scholars have realised that people will perceive left to right movement different from right to left movement - they'll see it as more natural, progressive, and comfortable to watch. A study proved this - 8 clips were shown to an audience, which had the character moving from left to right. Then, the same 8 clips were reversed, so everything went from right to left, and it was shown to a different audience. The left to right clips were perceived to be a lot more positive by the audience, and the right to left clips were thought of as not as good. There are many examples in the video (which is linked above) which prove this idea of lateral movement's effects on the audience, and the aforementioned study is also talked about.

Other factors play a role in how we interpret a subject's movement within a frame. For example, there's a concept in aesthetics that defines the actual angles of lateral movement -- the lateral movements that are either angled up toward the top of screen or down toward the bottom of the screen. These are defined as easy/hard ups/downs. They're broken down as such:

- Left to right from top to bottom: easy down
- Left to right from bottom to top: easy up
- Right to left from top to bottom: hard down
- Right to left from bottom to top: hard up

For example, in the training montages in Rocky, his character is seen running up some stairs, from left to right. This is an 'easy up' angle - and in this scene, we perceive him as powerful and strong will, and an overwhelmingly a good character, but this is reversed in the other picture - the zombies in World War Z are already perceived as bad, but this is exaggerated by the 'hard up' angle, which enforces the idea that they are bad.

So, overall, I think I am going to try and utilize this idea of lateral character movement affecting the audience's opinions of a character in my final opening. I think it's a great way to subtley tell the audience whether a character is good or bad, without actually saying directly or making them do anything obvious. It also allows for a lot of different camera angles and shot types to be used, and so it will make the opening more varied.