continuity
 

How much attention do the pros pay to continuity when editing? Obviously, when using a single camera to cover multiple angles of the same scene, not everything can match, and the more elements that are present, the fewer things that WILL match. What does TV and Hollywood get away with that I don't know about? I never catch mistakes in movies and stuff (except something I saw in "Porn n' Chicken" on Comedy Central).

When I edit, I try to make everything match, or cover it with a cutaway. I can never tell what joe schmoe is likely to notice, but our chief editor notices everything, and so do I.

Advice?

There's a difference between noticing and caring. If continutity flaws are distracting, repetitive, or break the logic of a scene, they may detract from the viewing experience.

Learning to maintain continuity is one of those things that a filmmaker improves upon with experience. Some continuity problems are all but unavoidable--cigarettes that shorten and lengthen, meals that miraculously become uneaten. Others, like mid-gesture hand positions, need to be edited around. Mindful actors and vigilant-eyed crew members help to avoid most problems; a script supervisor who keeps good continuity notes is a useful amenity if he or she is to be afforded. Usually less affordable but even more crucial in working out bugs ahead of time are rehearsals. If the continuity gaffes are too salient, necessitating reshoots, then the first shooting days end up being rehearsals anyway.

I can give one editing tip that mitigates the noticability of many continuity errors: cut on action. If an actor snaps into a pose, then the picture cuts to a different angle and the actor is in a different pose, the discontinuity is far more evident than if an actor is entering into a pose, then while the motion is still in progress the picture cuts to the actor arriving into a different pose. For new editors this is by no means obvious. Once employed, its magic is appreciated and sworn by.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man has continuity errors in nearly every scene--too many, some have guessed, to be accidental. This didn't stop the movie from becoming the biggest-opening film of all time and the biggest grosser of 2002. (Perhaps the flubs even contributed to the film's BO take--fanboys went back again to spot the more subtle errors.)

Picasso said, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." Films aren't about replicating reality, but rather about inducing moods, eliciting laughs, generating suspense, telling good stories. The real question you should be asking is not, will people notice, but rather, will people think less of the film when they notice?

Sorry I wasn't clearer before. I meant things like having someone's head turned one way in one shot and a different way in the following, or someone's mouth and opened and then suddenly closed. Easy to spot if they're the subject, but what if they're the main subject in one shot, and a mere member of a crowd in another?

I'm not a pro, and I can't improve what Robert wrote above. But here are two more perspectives:
1. I never hear people of the audience complain about bad continuity, nor does critics seem to be much interested in it. Bad acting is sometimes mentioned, and it is possible that bad continuity may LOOK like bad acting to some people. But bad continuity, or occasional continuity gaps pass unnoticed or at least unmentioned.

2. Still, as a non-pro, I fight hard to create smooth and unconspicuous continuity. That is one of the areas where good amateurs can be sorted from the rest. And if I can do something to be in the better group, I will.

(Your second post came in while I was writing. But my understanding of what continuity is, includes what you specified.)

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.

I recently saw an episode in which the apartment door is open on one wide shot, then after some close-ups, the next wide shot showed the door closed! I'm sure not many people noticed, because they're watching the action and characters.

Just thought it was interesting. :)

I understand that poloroids are helpful in this situation. A quick snapshot to compare locations, outfits, and I suppose, even poses between shots.

A serious and well-funded shoot will have a person who's only job is continuity. It takes a lot of money to be able to afford that person.

I shoot a lot of movie scenes for students in our actor training program. These are shot single-camera just like the movies and we have trained ourselves, myself and the director, to notice continuity issues before we shoot the first take. We block out the entire scene and examine it for continuity issues along with the other, more obvious concerns.

We get caught sometimes but then revert to editing tricks already mentioned like cutting on motion.

It really sucks when you miss something really obvious and its edit time!

This is where a portable miniDV viewer/player or mini DVD viewer/player come in handy. Just bring it to the set and compare the setup, action, clothing, etc. with the previous shoot.

So on that Seinfeld episode mentioned earlier, how do you think the editor decided that though the door was very obviously differen than it was in the previous shot, that particular cut was the best one to use? Especially since, as you said, they taped each episode twice and might have had a shot from another taping where the doors matched.

For the most part, continuity is ignored in episodic television once the footage has reached the editing room. Editors are more worried about pacing to ensure the comedic or dramatic beats shine through.

How 'bout in a feature film, same situation?

In Walter Murch's editing book "In the Blink of an Eye", he lists continuity as one of the least important elements an editor needs to pay attention to in order to make a scene work for the audience.

Murch lists emotion of the cut as the first priority an editor should look for. This leads me to assume a lot of scenes in films have continuity errors not because they went unnoticed, but because that probably happened to be the take that conveyed the best of the more important elements. A scene with better emotion and acting, but bad continuity, is far more acceptable to an audience than a scene with perfect continuity with bad composition and or emotion/acting.

I must disagree with Robert about episodic editors ignoring continuity. My experience has been that they are very aware of and concerned about continuity, however it usually will take a back seat to performance and pacing. Usually it is the director or producer that insist that they prioritize this way.

The bottom line is that you can get away with a lot--and telling the story should always come first. In the case of the Seinfeld episode, I'm sure the choice was made based on performance, and the door issue was duly noted.

Speaking of "cheating", which we do on virtually every setup in one way or another--one of my favorites is that we rotate the actors to get the best background, sometimes so radically that the actors are baffled when they arrive on set and hit their marks. An example of this would be on "Scrubs", where many of the hallway walk and talks end up in an over-the-shoulder shot. We line the actors up so that we are looking straight down the hall, with the actors staggered left and right. When we go to turn around and shoot the other side, were we to leave the actors where they are and set the camera accordingly, we would be shooting directly into a wall. Instead, we rotate the actors nearly 90 degrees so that we are shooting directly down the hall in the opposite direction that we were in the beginning. The relationship of the actors to each other stays the same, the eyelines switch accordingly, and thus it seems perfectly natural, but it doesn't make any sense from a real-life standpoint. If you check out any given episode of "Scrubs", you will likely see this in effect (and many other shows as well). The reason it works is that one pays attention to the actors in a scene, not to the four walls around them and where everything is in relation to that (aka the geography).

How do I overcome my disease that makes me want to match everything? It's hard to convince myself that an audiece won't notice and be distracted by something I notice, even though they usually aren't.

Anyway, you guys continually mention things that involve backgrounds or at least elements that aren't the focus of the scene. Am I to assume then, that the principal elements of the scene (character actions, etc.) need to match, and to hell with everything else?

It sounds to me like you aren't willing to trust your own instincts. Presumably you've shown the cut to a few other people. How did they feel about it? Was their first reaction based on the sequence's core conveyance, or was it, "Whoa, weird continuity..."?

I watched The Hulk last week, and in the restaurant sequence between Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliott, I found it difficult to follow the gist of the scene (not that any scene in that movie had a point to it anyway) because Ang Lee kept "crossing the line" (i.e., switching camera angles across an imaginary 180° hemisphere)--as big a camera sin as "breaking the fourth wall" is in theater work. In this particular case, the jumpiness was both utterly unecessary and mondo disorienting. (Also disorienting was that Jennifer Connelly decided to cry in every scene she was in. Save it for the climax, sister!) My point here: if the filmmaker had some plot point or mood he was trying to couch (the conveyance), it didn't come across because the shot angle choices were just too damn nonplussing. And so, in this case, my primary reaction wasn't, "Ah, what a sad perversion of the father-daughter relationship," it was merely, "I'm dizzy and there's two more hours of this to go!"

There are no hard and fast rules to these things as to what's allowable and what's not. Most filmmakers are perfectionists, but none of them have money, time, patience, and authority to reshoot until they eliminate every last disparity. Not made, abandoned...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

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?")

<<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!

<<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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!