Continuity

Hello everyone - I have a blog post on my Continuity lesson for you today!

Before my continuity lesson, I knew very limited information on the topic, I knew the main concept which is to ensure every scene is the same and following on to create a flowing structure. However, I was not aware of all the hard work and time that actually goes in to this specific section of filming and editing.

Firstly we were taught a bit about continuity and what it involves. The first thing I learnt that I was not aware of is that there is actually a whole team of people that are hired specifically for continuity. When actors or actresses are hired for filming, it is more than likely that they can only do an hour or two a day/week. This means that the scene they are being filmed in will not be finished in the time interval that they are available for and so they will have to continue filming it the next time they are available. The continuity team's job is to make sure everything is exactly the same in the scene from one day to another day (these could be weeks apart). They do this by taking pictures of the exact positioning of all the props and people in the scene and also of how the people in the scene look, including their make-up, hair and costume. Then, it will all be packed away and changed to a different setting with different props another scene. When they then come back to the scene that they had not finished filming, they will have to look at the pictures and make sure everything is positioned and styled exactly the same. They will then have to edit the clips together to make it look like it was all filmed at once and nothing ever changed. This sounds tricky and time-consuming already but when you think about every scar and piece of hair that has to be put in the exact same place, the weather and lighting that has to be made to look exactly the same and how long this would take it really drives home the amount of effort that these people go through!

We were then shown a clip where a group of people had filmed a video making continuity mistakes to show what it looks like when continuity is not used. Our task was to go away and create our own. My group decided to make the story in the short film very simple, three girls sat at a table having a basic conversation. We then focused on our continuity mistakes. Our main idea was to start off with just one single bottle on the table and keep adding more and more items as the video went on, so items would appear at random on the table throughout the video. We then included some less obvious mistakes such as two people changing jackets or laptops and labels disappearing off of bottles and then some even less obvious mistakes such as the tap in the background suddenly coming on and a ring disappearing from a person's finger. I have attached our final piece to this blog so that you can view it - Enjoy!

See you soon!