Why a Filmmaker Might Choose to Flip a Shot

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores why some films decide to flip a shot.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but personally, the first place my mind goes to when I think about continuity is props. You know: vanishing sandwiches, brooms magically switching hands, untucked shirts. That kind of thing.

Of course, continuity is a much bigger beast that touches most aspects of the filmmaking process. And generally speaking, the goal is to maintain a visual flow of a series of images. It’s the reason things like the 180-degree rule exist: to keep things feeling natural and to ensure that our attention is being directed the way the filmmakers intended.

Then again, sometimes rules are meant to be broken … not necessarily because you’re an artistic upstart but because in the whacky world of filmmaking, things don’t always go to plan.

There’s a really excellent example of this in La La Land. As the video essay below argues, Damien Chazelle’s 2016 film features a shot that is flipped to hide a problem. The essay does a great job of unpacking how sometimes filmmakers have to break some rules to preserve others. It’s a good reminder that filmmaking is a lot more like cooking than baking: it’s far from an exact science … and sometimes you need to course correct even if the recipe disagrees.

Watch “To Flip or Not to Flip?”

Who made this?

This video essay on why a director might flip a shot comes from Jesse Tribble, an American video essayist and comic book scholar. You can subscribe to Tribble’s channel and check out his back catalog here. And you can follow them on Twitter here.

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Related Topics: Cinematography, The Queue

Meg Shields is the humble farm boy of your dreams and a senior contributor at Film School Rejects. She currently runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She is also a curator for One Perfect Shot and a freelance writer for hire. Meg can be found screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).