I think back to other films now – ‘Indiana Jones /Crystal Skull’ – the opening scene when the car is heading to the test base, it’s driving right to left (ominous) and all of the car-vs-car fight scenes with Indy/Shia and baddies were right to left as well.

In ‘A New Hope’ (Star Wars) – Luke’s X-Wing goes down the Death Star trench left to right (hero destroying the evil) – Heck, in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ the AT-AT walker attack is right to left too.

Nice! I am looking forward to your continued input for sure!!

In “The life and death of Jeremy Bentham” there is an interesting scene where Locke is in the backseat of a car driven by Abbanon (sp?) after having been just instructed by Widmore to get everyone to go back to the island with him.

Abbanon slows the car to a stop while two shepards and a herd of sheep cross the road. They are crossing from the right of the car to the left of the car and there is a Green sign on the right of the car where the sheep are coming from. The car stops and Abbanon asks Locke ‘where are we headed’ and locke makes a decision to go see Sayid first. After he answers the question the shot pans out to the road again and the sheep are now walking back past the green sign, thus, back on to the right of the car.

Continuity error in filming or intentional?

nato64 — great piece, but any chance you could change the title for future installations?

“There was an interesting cut here, going from Kate picking up Aaron to a steadycam shot of her singing to him. Notice the sound bridge, she ’starts’ singing when he’s still in the car seat then it cuts to her walking, singing the song.”

I absolutely loved this cut, and now I know the term “sound bridge” which is part of the reason why. Great stuff. I’ve been struck by a lot of great scene constructions this season – Ben killing Locke, the alarm scene after the roundtable discussion in Lafleur, Sun pursuing Ben through the jungle in Namaste. Hope you can go back and do past episodes too.

Another thing about movement from right to left vs. left to right is: Movement left to right will mostly appear to be faster and have more impact than movement from right to left.

So, taking into account other factors, like the ones nato describes and the spatial relation rules, if a director needs speed or impact to a movement (whether it be a car chase or someone beating Ben into a bloody pulp), he’ll often try to stage it so that the movement happens left to right.

I think it has to do with a different (but somewhat related) kind of psychology when it comes to film… If you see someone being shot, and the wound is NOT on their left side, people tend to disregard it as “they’ll be fine”. So, when you don’t have time to emphasize the severity, go for the left.

On the other hand, if Ben had had a left side wound in “Whatever happened…”, the usual nitpicky audience would start questioning how he survived that for a whole episode (regardless that he could).

Hence, since there’s now time to establish the severity and urgency in other ways, place the wound on the right, in order to avoid disbelief from some of the audience. Most of them won’t notice the discrepancy between episodes (I know I didn’t).

In other words, I don’t think The Powers That Be changed their mind, or there was a slip, OR that it has any kind of story relevance — they just went with what worked best in each episode.

In my opinion, at least.

Looking at that last scene in “He’s Our You”, there are a lot of other “continuity errors”… — one of them a good example of the difficulties of maintaining the “180 degree line” and eyelines (not the Richard Alpert-kind) — which I can see nato will get back to… This is less interesting when it comes to the actual meaning of a scene — it goes deeper, into our basic comprehension of what’s going on:

Right when Ben reacts to Sayid quieting Jin, the close-up of his face has been flipped horizontally (note the tape on his glasses). These flips happen *very* often — especially on TV due to time constraints, and not least on Lost — not really due to the psychological right/left aspect nato discussed here, but rather in order to follow the “rules” that dictate how we interpret spatial relations between the characters in a scene.

Simplistically speaking: When two people interact (talk etc.) in a scene, keep one person on the left, facing right in all shots, and keep the other on the right, facing left. Or, put differently: Keep the camera on the same side of an imaginary line drawn between the two characters.

A great example of this, in the same episode, is when Ben confronts Sayid in Santo Domingo. Note that Ben is always looking right, and Sayid is always looking left — even if just slightly. It goes for the last scene too, and 99.9% of all other scenes in Lost, because if it didn’t, we’d be confused about where people were in relation to each other. We’d still be able to figure it out, but the cuts would look less fluid and draw attention to themselves.

Sometimes, especially when characters move between shots, it’s hard to figure out on set, and only noticed when putting it all together in the editing room. And in such cases, TV editors will usually try a flip, if there’s not too many revealing details (like signs or whatnot) in the shot.

Thankfully I haven’t noticed anyone start making theories based on those flips yet

I’ve never commented on this website before, but I loved your article SO much that I finally registered just so I could say: WOW!

I totally LOVE this kind of stuff. I have a question for you – and this is in HUGE debate over at Darkufo – what do you have to say about Little Ben’s bullet wound? In the ep where Sayid shoots him, the bullet hole is clearly on the LEFT side of his chest. THEN, in this past ep, the bullet wound is on the RIGHT side of his chest.

I don’t know what to make of this. Could this be a continuity error? Or is it intentional? With your knowledge, you may be able to shed some light on the situation.

Thanks!

P.S. Looking forward to hearing more from you in the future!