I appreciate you sharing that, and there's probably absolutely nothing wrong with following what it suggests. Even if it turns out not to be accurate or true, it seems harmless.
However...
I do not find the video convincing. Furthermore, some of its contents and conclusions set off alarm bells.
For one thing, the video begins with this example of flopping video to test this supposed perception effect (recreating a film described in the paper the video shamelessly rips off). But that sample itself contains unintended biases. In the first example, the cars across the street are parked facing screen left. But when they flop "all" the shots they miss flopping the first one, so when we first see the woman the cars are pointing screen left and she sits at screen left. but in the subsequent shot of her she's suddenly screen right and the whole room is reversed, and from here forward the cars face screen
right, so immediately something feels "wrong" because there's a continuity error (heck even without that, the facing of the parked cars could inherently feel "wrong" in either facing to audiences based on if they live in left or right drive countries). One hopes the original study film was not so sloppy.
The video then cherry picks shots from feature films to illustrate its conclusion, ignoring any practical filming considerations that might account for the directional choices. Consider the Hitchcock scene: when a left drive American car pulls to a sidewalk on a two way street in front of a building and the filmmaker wants to show the feet of someone stepping out, they're almost invariably going to put the camera towards the back of the car, which, means to the right of the car, which means the persons exiting are going to walk screen right to where the building is. In the UK or Japan that would be the opposite.
Further, the video sometimes conflates screen direction standards with this supposed left v. right difference. One could just as easily argue the Hobbits travel towards screen right because Mordor is
east of the Shire and one western cinematic convention is that screen right=east (like on a map).
So what is this video based on?
Its description cites a whopping two academic papers as its sources, so I found them. The video basically cribs from the one titled "Which Way Did He Go? Directionality of Film Character and Camera Movement and Subsequent Spectator Interpretation". (The citation was a broken link, but I found it through the magic of the Wayback Machine plugin (
link)). Basically, the video treats the paper as factual, whereas the paper itself says:
This study, then, is a step along the path to providing quantitative, empirical support to phenomena that have heretofore been examined via other modes such as semiotics (Eco, 1976; Metz, 1974). This convergence of critical cultural and empirical quantitative perspectives is rarely found in film studies, and is a much needed confluence in the scholarly literature.
I went through the paper and I find it...sketchy. There are clumsy logical inferences and some dubious conclusions. Example: referencing that so many single player 2D videogames have "forward" to the right...which probably has its roots in 2 player games. When you number two players' scores on a screen in the west, you write 1 first then 2, not 2 then 1. So, when you make a game that can be played either with 1 or 2 players, where does a single player (1) start? Screen left facing right. So one can argue that's an equally valid—and more likely—origin for the initial facing of Player 1 characters than what this paper speculates. Blame Pong. I do (damn you Al Alcorn!).
The paper also makes a ludicrous leap to
Pitfall! as supporting evidence...and cites the book
Racing the Beam to buttress that. Mind you, I know the programmer of the former and a map I did was cited and reproduced in the latter.
The meat of the paper concerns an experiment conducted and which the video badly reproduced (with the aforementioned biases). Alarmingly, the paper gives
no indication of the number of participants in that survey (unless i missed it), which provides little confidence that the test was broad enough to account for common statistical error. Furthermore, the paper notes the subjects were recruited from "Communication courses" and not a general cross-section of people, which in itself could skew the results. There's also zip mention of control groups.
The paper also contains this troublingly unbiased statement: "Some filmmakers
also realize the importance of action moving from the left to the right versus from the right to the left." Emphasis mine, which implies there
is importance to it, not that there
may be.
The second paper (
link) is solely about The Kuleshov Effect (
link) which is referenced in the first paper, but not in a context that supports the argument, but about how Kuleshov believed lateral movement to be the easiest for audiences to follow (whereas the Kuleshov Effect suggests the way shots are cut together and interact has more impact than the content of either shot individually.) BTW, skimming the Kuleshov paper cited I see no mention of screen direction.
So, is what the video postulating possible? Yes. Is there convincing evidence for it?
Meh.