continuity

[Josh Bass]

I never showed the questionable cuts to anyone but me; I just edited for the continuity. The shoot I'm referring to was a problematic one, a commericial we had all of three hours to shoot, that involved three prinicipals (or is it principles?) about 10 ten or so extras, and an attempted film lighting setup. Extras were brought in at the last minute, then left before all shots were completed, as did several of the extras who arrived on time. e. People who were standing next to or behind the principals (or "les") in the wideshots were missing in the closeups, and left the backgrounds in the closeups empty when they shouldn't have been (no time to significantly reposition the camera and then the lighting so as to cheat this setback). Anyway, continuity nightmare.

I saw some line crossing in the recent Neil Labute film, "The Shape of Things." Not at all disorienting, but still very naughty.

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

Well we're beyond advice now and into consolation:

Watch the nightly national news on one of the major networks and you'll see some of the most high-budget commercials (almost all for cars and drugs), yet some of the most egregious voice dubs and continuity errors anywhere.

[Josh Bass]

Alright, after this, I'm to stop taking up Chris' bandwidth.

SO. . .edit for emotional content/pacing/comic timing if the error is not ridiculous to everyone, including your blind aunt Jane. If it is noticable, edit around it.

Yeah, what's with those commercials anyhow?

And the real answer seems to be, there is no real answer.

[Brad Simmons]

The real answer seems to be: try as much as you can to achieve continuity, but don't sacrifice the more important elements in order to achieve it, because it's not as important.


1. Emotion
2. Story
3. Rhythm
4. Eye-trace
5. Two dimensional plane of screen
6. Three dimensional plane of screen

To quote Walter Murch again...

"The ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the folowing six criteria at once.

1. It is true to the emotion of the moment.
2. It advances the story.
3. It occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'
4. It acknowledges what you might call 'eye-trace'- the concern with the location and movement of the audiences' focus of interest within the frame
5. It respects 'planarity'- the grammer of three dimensions transposed by photography to two.
6. It respects the three dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in relation to one another).


Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom.

For instance, if you are considering a range of possible edits for a particular moment in the film, and you find that there is one cut that gives the right emotion and moves the story forward, and is rythmically satisfying, and respects the eye-trace and planarity, BUT fails to preserve the continuity of three dimensional space, then by all means, that is the cut you should make."


I agree with a lot of what Murch says about continuity. He goes much deeper into these concepts in this book.

[Paul Tauger]

Each "Seinfeld" episode was taped twice in front of an audience with multiple cameras - and the 2 shows were then combined into one, using the best shots from each.

All live audience sit-coms are shot this way or, at least they were when I was in the business 15 years ago. On production day, there are two performances, the "real" one and a dress rehearsal. Both are shot in front of an audience, and scenes from the dress rehearsal are used where necessary to "fill in" the primary performance. There may have been a crew person responsible for continuity, but I don't remember ever seeing one at an iso shoot. When I did episodic television shows shot with a single film camera, there was always a continuity person who would take polaroid stills of the actors and set after each take, and who was responsible for making sure that shots matched. I once did an Amazing Stories, in which I was required to be eating a hamburger with a chimpanzee (one of the high points of my acting career ;) ). The prop department had twenty or thirty hamburgers prepared, and considerable attention was paid to how much I ate in each take. They also provided the infamous "spit bag" so I wouldn't have to swallow all those burgers.

As I recall, I saw many more continutiy errors in the four-camera iso shoots I did, than in the single camera "traditional" projects.

[Mike Rehmus]

Both the Sony PD150 and the DSR-300 have memory functions to help continuity by overlaying a stored image from tape onto the camera's live video.

I imagine that other cameras offer similar features.

[John Locke]

Charles,

Call me dense...I'm just not following your explanation of the hallway scene for Scrubs. Can you put it in idiot terms for me... maybe using a clock or compass metaphor?

[Tor Salomonsen]

It all gets easier when you think about this way: Do I want to be true to the set and the location OR to the illusion my production is trying to create?

[Josh Bass]

Ah yes, but isn't part of the illusion continuity? Doors don't magically close in real life.

[Charles Papert]

Robert, this is something that comes up nearly every day for me. The "line" is rapidly becoming a choice rather than a rule, and it's getting harder to know when to observe it vs. just ignore it completely. I have taken to studying films that flaunt the line jumping to try to make some sense for myself out of how far you can take this sort of thing these days. For instance, I was fascinated by "The 25th Hour" because it had some pretty creative coverage that jumped all over the line, but yet it worked. When that comes out on DVD, I think I'll watch it again to break it down as an exercise and figure out why I liked it.

John, rather than go into one of my endless clock metaphors (I suspect it might fail me) I will send you a diagram, and perhaps you can post it in some way for others who might be interested.

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

Chas: "choice"/"rule"--it's not as if someone legislated it, as a real law, because people were getting hurt without it. It's a law more akin to the sense of "law" we signify when we refer to the law of gravity or the law of natural selection: we talk about it because it's a truism of film grammar. And as with English grammar, of course there are creative ways to/reasons for spurning it. But English grammar too exists for efficacy, and neglecting the 180° rule purely out of spite--as Ang Lee does in The Hulk--is as childish and inadvisable as prose with excess punctuation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'll try to catch The 25th Hour to see what you're talking about, but if I say any more on this topic I think I'll be retreading the ground I already amply covered in my Die Another Day thread, viz., thoughtful intention is the difference between substantive style and fadist pseudostyle.

I might add that you will doubtlessly have a completely different feel for the rule while wearing your steadicam operator hat. I want to make it explicit that this is not what I'm talking about. Naturally, the rule does not apply to steadicam motion across the line, because the spatio-temporal continuity of image preempts any possible confusion about which direction we're pointing and who is placed where.

And also, I don't want to make it seem like I'm adopting a contrarian or combative posture on topics like these. I have the utmost respect and interest in your work and how you deal with these sorts of bleeding edge issues. I guess I'm just trying to voice my conservative frustration with what I perceive as the senseless breakdown of the cherished fabric of filmic expression even in mainstream big-budget films--the methodical replacement of the tried and true with the amateur as some adolecent sort of declaration of stylistic independence--as with the ridiculous effects transition montages that added ten minutes to The Hulk, or the several strange and meaningless uses of post slow motion in the new Terminator movie... (Producer to editor: "You know, I'm thinking that shot just isn't, um, long enough. 'Cause, you know, if it were longer, it might be, uh, scarier. Don't you have a filter for that or something?")

[Charles Papert]

<<Chas: "choice"/"rule"--it's not as if someone legislated it, as a real law, because people were getting hurt without it. It's a law more akin to the sense of "law" we signify when we refer to the law of gravity or the law of natural selection:>>

My brother, I only wish it was as easy to break the laws of gravity as it is to break the law of "the line"! I'd have a much easier time carrying around that Steadicam--and the mind boggles at what that could result in when it comes to the "fairer sex"...pardon my digression.

That aside, be assured that I was not at all speaking from a defensive stance. I was just pointing out that this is indeed a current issue, and in the industry we are often required to kowtow to the bleeding edge of fashion/trendiness when it comes to the visuals. I'm just trying to open my mind to new ways to block things. It's weird to think that D.W. Griffith had to "invent" the close-up, but for a period of time at the birth of movies, it was assumed that humans had to be photographed full frame, because it would look freakish to chop them off in the middle of their bodies. So goes "the line", perhaps, and what seems overly stylized or showy today may just be the standard we come to know and accept tomorrow...whether we like it or not!

One visual note that is omnipresent now is the quick cut from standard speed to slow motion (or high speed, in some instances). I remember about six years doing a music video with a long Steadicam shot at the beginning that involved a speed ramp from 72 fps to 24 to enable the singer to lipsync. We took plenty of care to make sure that the timing was just right and the speed ramp was smooth and invisible. When I saw the video, certain sections were sped up in post and then hard cut back to 24 fps. I thought it was bizarre and distracting at the time. Now that it is commonplace (sure saw a lot of it in Charlie's Angels II) it isn't so weird anymore.

Regarding the difference between Steadicam and conventional (static) photography, yes, you are right that it doesn't adhere to the same rules as long as the shot is not cut into. When coverage is planned, I have to be very cognizant of eyelines and screen direction and image size and all that good stuff.

It took me a few years of daily mental calisthenics to get the "rules" down, now I'm in the process of learning how to break them. Some may argue that it's more creative never to learn the rules in the first place, and while I might have poo-pooed this concept in the past, I'm starting to wonder if there may be some truth to this as the vocabulary of film continues to evolve. Hard to say!

[John Locke]

<<as with the ridiculous effects transition montages that added ten minutes to The Hulk, or the several strange and meaningless uses of post slow motion in the new Terminator movie...>>

I don't know... there are plenty of movies that don't use many effects and slow-mo passages. So for the ones that do, I usually enjoy them simply because they're "eye candy." My eyes see realism all day long...it's nice to escape that from time to time. Maybe that's a sign of old age...you know, similar to how painters often start using brighter, wilder colors and style the older they get.

That's not to say effects always add something beneficial... but in those cases when an effect doesn't work well, you can usually argue that the movie is lacking something overall and probably would've suffered a bit no matter how you changed that particular scene.

I also think it's kind of funny how everyone seems to expect every film to be completely original. You have one French painter who paints the first impressionistic painting and he's labeled a genius. You get a whole bunch of painters to follow in the same impressionistic style and you have a "movement" or "genre." But with film, one director shoots a film using an original technique and he's a genius... while any other directors who later use that style in their films are considered copy cats. Go figure.

That's the way I see it, Robert!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!