I use maps a lot in my work, and before that I was one of those kids whose favorite book was a street atlas, so when I’m out and about I’m thinking of myself as existing on the map rather than looking at a map to provide a crude description of my reality, if that makes sense.
I also feel like I get more of a sense of what direction I’m going from seeing the little icon representing myself moving toward the lower left-hand corner than I do from some disembodied compass icon with the N pointing to the lower-right.
I’ve never really thought about it, so it must be pretty automatic.
The film would have been fine and of the proper length without those shots. Just leave the damned things out. We’re talking about the Smithsonian here, not Black Sheep Squadron.
More simply, what if you’re driving along and need to make a right turn at some point up ahead? I have my car GPS (not phone) set up to auto-rotate so that “up” is always the direction I’m heading, so that a right turn appears on the map like a … duh … right turn. If it appeared on the map as a left turn, or an up or down turn, it would be confusing as hell. The default “North” orientation on a paper map is a perfectly fine convention. It makes absolutely zero sense for a GPS. A dynamic navigation display on a GPS is not a “map” so much as a dynamic visual guide that needs to be as intuitive and clear as possible unless one wishes the driver to go off in random wrong directions and eventually collide with a telephone pole at some point. It needs to be a picture more or less as the driver sees it from his front windshield.
Absolutely not! But in a movie that shows a plane flying from west to east, and the external shots are all from one direction, why not use the standard convention that the plane is flying from left to right?
I don’t think there’s really any distinction between use of a GPS map and a paper map. If you’re navigating with a paper map the technique is the same - the first thing you do is to find where north is in the real world, and then rotate the paper map in your hands so that north on the map is pointing north. A GPS map just does the rotation automatically for you.
You’re assuming your conclusion that this convention exists. It doesn’t.
A film of a plane flying through the sky is not a film of a map, it’s a depiction of reality. There is no convention that reality is oriented with west to the left. That would be equivalent to a convention that when we’re not doing anything much, we always turn to face north! When you’re trying to find your way around, you rotate your map to orient it to reality, you don’t rotate reality reality to conform to your map.
As I asked above, would you depict a plane that’s flying south to be flying vertically down toward the bottom of the screen?
If you film somebody walking down the street, does this “convention” exist? Of course not - whether the shot shows the person walking the wrong way would depend on defining features in the background - buildings, etc. Or is it wrong to show a shot of a car driving west from behind, with the sun setting in the background?
Why do you claim this convention exists solely for planes, and solely when flying due east or due west, since clearly your convention doesn’t work if they are on any other heading, unless you propose showing planes flying diagonally or vertically on the screen.
The filming convention that going left means going west and going east means going right applies not just to planes, but for all sorts of travel, be it planes, trains, or motorcycles.
The reason is because the sun is to the south, and so you want to make sure that what you’re filming is lit properly-- instead of being in shadow and backlit.
Roger Ebert mentions this in his review of “The Book of Eli” when he points out that the character is going the wrong way if he wants to go West (although if you’ve seen the movie, you may realize that there’s probably a good reason for the character to do so) The Book of Eli movie review & film summary (2010) | Roger Ebert