“There are techniques you can use where it looks fine for a few minutes,” says Hays, “but if you do it for 90 minutes you’ll give people a splitting headache.”
Even a simple scene around a table, he adds, could fall into that category. “Say we’re filming this conversation, and shooting it from different positions in traditional 2D style. If you’re not careful about making sure that you are the same distance from the camera as I am as we’re cutting, it makes your eyes work overtime, because we’re jumping in depth from cut to cut. That, for various reasons, can be tough to watch, and if you keep it up it’ll give you a headache and you won't know why.”
Action scenes, particularly when they involve quick cuts, have their own set of rules: “You always hear this notion that you can’t cut quickly, which actually isn’t true.
But you have to control what you’re cutting to and from. We have what we call the rule of three. Typically, if you’re working on a shot, you have to know what shot led into that shot, and which one you’re going to, for the 3D to make sense across the cuts.”