The audience can pick up that something is wrong if a character isn’t staring at the right place- if he or she doesn’t seem to be interacting or engaging with their surroundings in a natural way. In the case of ourHitFilm exercise mob (a wide angle shot) that’s not so acute, but one might imagine that if characters from one layer seemed to react to characters from another by careful timing, it would help the believability of the shot even more.

HaZ also points out that it’s good to have something in shot for our actors to stare at, but green tennis balls on a stand like he mentions might not inspire the most emotionally charged performance!

“Legend” is a 2015 film starring Tom Hardy (written and directed by Brian Helgeland) that clones Tom Hardy into the roles of both of the notorious Kray twins. Tom Hardy was praised for his performance – so it’s clearly possible to create emotive performances by looking at tennis balls and stands rather than another actor.